The workers are distant and hidden in the picture

Here's a North Korean painting of a field, with the workers being distant:

Here's another North Korean painting without a focus on people:

Here's a Chinese painting, one which is also clearly taking inspiration from traditional East Asian painting traditions:

What is the value that solar-punk brings to the table over socialist realism

Okay, this I find somewhat more agreeable, I love me some socialist realism and wish we had more of it in the modern day... but like, let people draw their cute little fields and houses. I wish a lot of the art field was different from what it was, but that's a purely subjective, selfish value judgement of me wanting more of the art I enjoy and less of the art I don't enjoy, not a functional political program.

When you're in power you can put this in the state censorship guidelines and have those dang solarpunk fascists all shot or whatever. Doesn't seem like a particularly productive approach to building socialism, but you know, you do you.

Surely we can draw inspiration from actual socialist art when imagining the future instead of corporate aesthetics

Okay, but the whole 70 gajilion comment argument you've gotten in is with people, like me, who believe Soviet art has a greater diversity than just "workers workers workers, all day, just working", and we have worked to give you numerous examples of such art.

Here's a modern Chinese artist who I would consider to be working in something we might call Contemporary Socialist Realism - Fan Wennan. They're not your typical solarpunk fare, as they tend to feature some rather massive constructions rather than quaint little farms in the middle of nowhere, but they also often don't feature any focus on workers.

There are a handful more in the tradition of workers being framed centrally that you want, but the majority are more like the above examples.

This is clearly inspired by actual Soviet art - and yet, it still would not fit your expectation, because you've selectively latched onto one sub-genre of Soviet art and declared that to be the one and only true form of it, to the ignorance of all else that Soviet (and Chinese, and Korean, and Vietnamese, etc.) artists did.

Landscape painting is its own genre, with its own conventions, and generally does not feature a focus on the people in-frame - and when it does, usually the person is portrayed in contemplation or awe of the landscape, as in the famous Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. Should we outlaw this entire genre? Actual socialist countries did not, so you have a more hardline stance any socialist government!

I would agree that there should be more solarpunk depicting a focus on workers - but this thread started with the maximalist assumption of "most solarpunk does not feature people" (trivially disproven by multiple paintings posted by others, at which point you pivoted to yeah, but those people aren't workers, and then once another poster disproved that, you pivoted to um, they're portrayed wrong - this is clearly bourgeois leisure berry-picking and not agricultural fruit harvesting, because, uh... and ad-hominem arguments about people having never "set a foot on a farm"), and "paintings of landscapes that aren't focused on people are fascistic", which is a rather extreme statement, given that, again, landscape painting is a genre that exists, and has been partaken in by many socialist artists.

Maybe if you'd opened up with something less inflammatory, this thread would have gone differently, and led to some more productive discussions (well, it was pretty productive to me, I've added like 30 cute little paintings to my image collection).