The game is "cheating" all the time. All the successful games with thousands of repetitive levels, go whale fishing and have engagement promoting strategies.

The general strategy is:

• Introduce core mechanics "organically" over the first few levels, then keep a periodic "loading screen tip" reminder
• Add a harder level every several easier ones
• Introduce "boosters" with a few free ones
• Dis-associate booster cost from real money cost by having an "in-game currency" (not actual currency) with some non-intuitive conversion ratios
• Add a second kind of free-ish in-game currency to keep players used to making in-game purchases
• If a player runs out of boosters, give them some free ones after a while
• Improve user engagement with regular reminders and periodic offers
• Promote FOMO with limited-time offers
• Add mechanics with obvious MiniMax-ing strategies, that are however impossible for a person with a normal life to MiniMax, while offering a way to use in-game currencies to correct for that
• Keep adding cosmetic changes
• Introduce slightly new mechanics once in a while every a lot of levels, combine mechanics together if you've run out of ideas
• For each level, have a predefined setup that makes it extremely easy to solve, along with normal generators that make them hard to solve
• Use the easy setups to showcase new mechanics and boosters
• Use the hard setups to make people want to spend boosters, and buy them, and use real money to purchase in-game currency to do that
• Ideally, have a level generator with tunable difficulty that can be adapted for every user
• Offer whales big spenders exclusive VIP levels, that require a lot of spending to win
• Add one or more "leaderboards" for big spenders to showcase how much they spend good they are
• Remove real world time clues for big spenders, don't let them realize for how many hours they've been throwing their money away
• If a big spender drops their spending or engagement level, shower them with offers, assign a personal manager, offer invitations to real world events… whatever it takes (up to a certain % of their expected monthly spending)
• Periodically expand the game with hundreds and thousands of "new" levels… which follow the same rules

Bonus points if you add "seasons" and a "season pass".

Extra bonus if you place and cross-promote a number of games with the same strategy but different cosmetic themes.

Casino mode: have thousands of "games" all in one, with different cosmetics, complex winning modes, and very simple mechanics (press button to spin, press button to auto-spin 1000 times, etc)… but in most jurisdictions you need to calculate and disclose the exact odds of winning in each mode for every level generator.