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"