Your comparison to Satisfactory makes me think you’re approaching the game with a completely wrong mindset. It’s not supposed to be a chill sandbox playground with no difficulty where you rapidly conquer the planet and build cool stuff. It’s intended to be an engaging survival game with a horror aspect of diving into dark depths and hoping that whatever lurks there doesn’t notice you. It’s meant to be atmospheric, with the threat of starvation, predators and later on some story aspects pushing you to explore further and deeper for materials and tech.
I hope you give the game anoher chance at some point because it really is a one of a kind experience. There’s two things you should be aware of: First, in regards to another comment: there’s no events for you to miss, IDK what that person is saying. There’s two big plot points that happen in a playthrough regardless of your presence. Both of them give you a timer well in advance so you can show up to / observe the place when it happens. Everything else, like all the distress signals or abandoned bases? They’re empty from the start of the game, even if you go there immediatelly nothing will change. You aren’t missing out on anything.
Second, don’t feel bad about missing out on upgrades or whatver. The vast majority of them are sidegrades. The important stuff that you need to progress both spawns much more often than the sidegrades, and you will often find it at the distress signal locations.
The rightwing/gamergate side not contesting this whole issue being called “Politics in videogames” is the biggest blunder. I don’t know the best way to call this phenomenon (political preaching?) but surely there is a better phrase. Right now you can’t talk about this stuff without getting hit by “Oh, you claim to hate politics in videogames yet you love Bioshock” type retort, when the actual thing people have problems with are californian nutcases pushing their views on US political crap onto the player as if it were gospel.