It's a nice escape. It's realistic enough for you to become immersed and actually feel like you're driving a truck but arcadey enough for you to disable certain real life features like speed limits and other stuff (not that I disable them, I find them to make the game more interesting). It's just a really nice thing to go on a long ass road trip across Europe listening to some Johnny Cash (or any other music of your choice, for example, there's a radio called Truckers FM that is dedicated to ETS, it's really well done tbf). I personally have found that it helps cure boredom as well cause you can just drive somewhere for free.
I would highly recommend it and the DLC's, they're well worth the money and help the Dev team keep the game updated. It's got a large modding scene as well and there's always new stuff on the workshop. It's just a really well made and well executed simulator that can be as arcadey or as realistic as you want. 10/10 from me