To be fair, that’s just the culture that’s come up around the game. You have to plan how you play if you want to “win” in the first 2 years, but the only thing you get is a few candles lit in your backyard, and you can still “win” in later years if you play more slowly. You absolutely can just plant some stuff around a sprinkler, sleep until they are grown, and do everything you want to do without being at all efficient with it
It definitely wouldn’t be the left image. With legs like those, you could never pull the pants up past the first (or I guess technically last) level of branching. It would either be the big pants or a large number of seperate, smaller pants on each of the lowest branches.