Having played FFE and FSX I can't really say I feel like ED in terms of physicality in the real world. When I'm coasting my cutter in for a landing I'm reminded of landing a pmdg boeing in FSX.
That said, I've imagined about ED commodities while eating or buying groceries. And wondered about how much a credit was worth in dollars. I did an extrapolation as I'm sure some of us have done where I took a price of a water bottle and from there calculated a credit in terms of dollars , and found out that gold was back to 1970's levels so maybe a good thing with thousands of worlds, some went back to the gold standard. And practically every player pilot in the pilot's federation (those that already survived long enough to upgrade from the starting sidewinder) is already a rich multi-millionaire in the top 2% of all the trillions of people in the civilized bubble, lol.