To be fair, it seems like I may have had bad luck in the first three solarpunk works I ever experienced. My issue against the whole idea is "this is a society that can no longer afford to value non-practical pursuits, it is the future we are headed towards, therefore our present society can no longer afford to value non-practical pursuits" that was somehow in all three solarpunk works I encountered.

The three in question were Girl in Wave: Wave in Girl, the Necroverse by "RichM", and a story that a fair-weather friend wrote that I no longer have a copy of that showed a dystopian cybersolarpunk hybrid where "Covid-19 has ended the modern age and now everything is powered by wind turbines because most of us are dead".

As a result of such bad luck, I may have overestimated how central that theme of "self-sufficiency or die" is to the genre.