I wish the Lego Technix line would expand to be more about weird machines like this.
I asked my brother-in-law if my nephew would like a more advanced Technix set as a gift, he said no, they were mostly cars and vehicles and he wasn’t interested in that kind of thing. I wouldn’t have been at that age either. A wicked Rube Goldberg machine though…
I think the Technic Lego kits that I grew up with (that were more about how things worked rather than looking exactly like the thing) have been rebranded as "Lego Education": https://education.lego.com/en-gb/shop/secondary/
My kids are mostly uninterested in the cars, but they loved the recent 42197 Earth and Moon orbiting the Sun.
They also like using the sorted boxes of Technic pieces to build crazy contraptions and my oldest has gotten into Spike Prime programming (Scratch/Blockly or Python).
I asked my brother-in-law if my nephew would like a more advanced Technix set as a gift, he said no, they were mostly cars and vehicles and he wasn’t interested in that kind of thing. I wouldn’t have been at that age either. A wicked Rube Goldberg machine though…