You can start crafting foundations to build on a grid pretty early on in the game, but as a Factorio player I also tried building straight on the ground in my first save and that was pretty annoying. But then you realize that foundations are pretty cheap and you can just cover a huge area and basically ignore terrain.

To me scaling isn't strictly harder than in Factorio, it's just different. Being able to utilize the third dimension and build ad-hoc layers ( or spaghetti :p ) where needed is awesome, I like the additional "modularity"

Not sure if you are aware, but foundations give you a grid system to use. A lot of players will build foundations up high, and build on a large, floating platform. I came from Factorio, and I actually really liked the factory size/shape constraints in Satisfactory, as it doesn't let me use the same design solution for every resource node. Some places trains can easily get to, others require trucks to get the resources to where the train can pick them up, and others still require drones. I felt like in factorio, I could use the systems I came up with early throughout the entire game, and the only thing I needed to change was how to pump resources into my factory and scaling up my defense system.