The world as a character

This is likely more of a genre item, for SciFi and Fantasy, but it is something worth considering.
How much attention do we authors pay to crafting the worlds we write in? I ask this going beyond simple logical continuity. I occasionally run across works that the world itself is almost another character in the story the way it engages the reader. It is well fleshed out and engaging, in such a way that it has the reader wanting to learn more about the world itself. Granted this gets deeply entangled with the plot of the story to give the world a bit of a character arc. But the reader does see the world change, like a character with a bit of an arc. It is a shallow arc, but it is there to a degree.

If we approach world building as we would building a character, how does that effect drawing the reader into the story? What are the impacts of the story events on the broader world? And how can we use this to draw the reader deeper into the story? Can we learn from the mystery genre, in how information is spooned out over the length of the story, to make our fictional world more interesting?

Many readers see story as an escape from their daily life. So part of our job becomes transforming that escape from a stay-cation, into a 5 star resort in an exotic location. An experience that has them talking about the story, like some people share vacation pictures, but without the groaning their friends do at the prospect. It means more work for us in the crafting, editing, and polishing of a story, But it also means putting out a higher quality product at the end.