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The game would be so much more interesting if it included tools to actually build efficient systems (e.g. programmable behaviour so that machines produce the right number of components and then hold, or better yet switch to another recipe so that you don't have downtime but you also aren't trying to store or dispose of surplus inventory.) In its current state, all it does is (badly) pretend to imitate Just-in-Time philosophy; but what it actually achieves is a nightmare mockery of JIT which would make any adherent of real JIT break down weeping. It's not hard to understand why the devs are chasing Number Go Up as their holy grail of user experience -- they've built the most graphically complicated successor to Cookie Clicker to date, and they want users chasing that same never-ending reward drip-feed for hitting new records... but they could have quite easily turned the game into something more than just Cookie Clicker with Extra Steps if they had simply factored in the idea that some people get more enjoyment from completing a task elegantly than from brute-forcing their way to a messy ending. And the thing is, had they taken that path they could still cater for the Number Always Go Up crowd, and had them be endlessly happy... but they wouldn't have alienated a whole swathe of other types of creative players along the way.
The factory building and automation options in vanilla Minecraft (i.e. redstone, hoppers, rail mechanics, and block intereactions) are already magnitudes ahead of the options available in Satisfactory -- and frankly have been for years. There are plenty of tiny indie games/teams that absolutely eat Satisfactory's lunch when it comes to factory design; off the top of my head there's Mob Factory, Dawn Apart, Shape Heroes, Mindustry... That's before we start talking about the larger and better-resourced projects (such as Techtonica) that are starting to pop up which can compete with Satisfactory on graphics and 'production value', and absolutely wipe the floor with it on factory-building mechanics (with things like logic systems, dynamic/terraformable terrain, dynamic recipes, fleshed out narratives, and vastly improved QoL that doesn't rely on making the player slog through chores just so they'll 'appreciate' the upgrades later on!) At this point, the only reason that Satisfactory is a 'big player' in the genre is because it was the first game with a AAA budget behind it to do the factory building genre in 3D.
FICSIT coupons reward wasteful design because anything else would be an admission that Satisfactory has absolutely nothing else to offer beyond watching the number go up. Which is pretty sad given how much was promised of Satisfactory's "innovative experience", and how many options are within reach if the devs wanted to branch out and actually put some interesting mechanics into the game. Even a simple re-ordering of the techs available in the early game (with a little bit of narrative justification) could dramatically improve the experience -- it could easily become a game about starting with powerful but limited options and having to branch out into compromises and tradeoffs with ever-more meaningful downsides; it could also easily become a game that actually encourages maximalism and gives us tools to exploit those opportunities without enforcing a horrible slog of chores for each 'improvement' step. We could have either of those games... but instead, we have Cookie Clicker: Dystopian Colonial Nightmare Edition. Click the button to build more machines that each do precisely one thing, and ignore the fact that even though wireless communication clearly exists in this setting it's apparently more cost-effective to have you walk out and push a button manually (spending real-world time on a virtual chore) than to just add a radio transceiver to each machine for remote operation from the HUB.
Btw, a look at the game description on the Steam Store undermines your whole argument. Just to bring in some snippets:
The game is litterally designed to be "produce more and then more until you've done it!". Also the sinks help for making a storage system that doesn't back up and can be easily sorted.
And the "number go up" thing is a basic human thing. We like to see numbers go up and to compare them. Because that is something we can easily grasp and understand. Being more conditional of "do this but avoid this while doing this other thing too and use as little as that thing" is not as easy for our monkey brains to comprehend.
https://satisfactory.wiki.gg/wiki/AWESOME_Sink#Coupon_cost
I think the coupon system make the game better for me at least. Before the this feature was added my factories were constantly backed up and shut down once containers got full while I was working on the next factory to progress. With the sink in the game we now can have factories that run continuously at whatever rate we want. This becomes a measurement of how many parts per minute you can make and I am always trying to push that number higher and higher by increasing efficiency and new designs.
Whether or not coupons are the reward for this is only a side benefit that is good but not really required for me. but if the items int he awesome shop was not available by coupons then it would still need to be available via milestones so it doesnt matter. So the coupon system gives the sink a little more purpose.
I can do short. I choose not to, because unlike the louder part of this community, I'm not afraid of a complex discussion.
And your (mis)reading of those store page promises is another case in point. Those store descriptions explicitly claim that you can "play however you like", that you'll have multiple options to configure your factory. This is patently not true. You can put your machines over here, or over there; but you will always be building the same machines in roughly the same order and roughly the same ratios. The only "optimisation" available comes from building a spreadsheet to reverse-engineer the design logic of the game's map layout.
Nowhere in those quotes you've pulled does it say "this is a game where the number going up is the entire point and nothing else matters." In fact, the last quote implies the opposite -- it implies that you'll have options in how you make the number go up, at least. This is not the reality of the game as it stands. There are no meaningful choices beyond "what order do I hit these nodes?"; everything is a single (artificially) stretched-out 'to do' list; and the order that you tackle those items on it makes no difference to the overall shape of your factory. All you can choose to do is slow yourself down by trying to tackle the ones that you can't support yet, you can't choose to, say, build up an alternative production stream that will come to fruition later. You can't build lines that switch their output, or try to design any kind of "elegant" solution that produces exactly enough parts for a goal (e.g. a refinery that produces enough plastic to unlock fuel generators and then shuts down awaiting you to reconfigure the line for fuel production.)
The only thing you can possibly optimise for in Satisfactory is increasing PPM. That's not "factory design", it's a 1-dimensional reduction of all of the engineering principles that this game claims to weave into it (but fails to deliver upon.)
There's a tiny amount of sequence-breaking made possible by the crashed pods; but I've run the math on that and you don't actually get any benefit from doing it -- by the time you've run around grabbing those components that you need, you still come up short for the machines that you would need in order to get a meaningful leg-up at every single 'tier breakpoint'/major progression step. The only one that makes any difference is the option to grab all the parts for a set of blade runners (you can do this at any start location; they all have pods nearby with the required parts scattered around); and honestly I'm starting to suspect that the devs intentionally did a pass on what's available at those crashed pods to ensure that they can't be used to sequence break. The fact that roughly the same materials are available in crashed pods at roughly the same distances from each start location certainly makes me suspicious.
But more than that, your entire premise that sinks "are efficient because they stop your lines from backing up" is a load of utter ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. What the sink does is allow the line to keep running even when it's not producing anything useful! It's like having an entire factory that produces clothes and conveyors them straight into a giant bonfire so that the factory can get a tax write-off. That's not "efficient", that's waste on a grand scale in order to cover up a second source of waste somewhere else, and a poorly designed set of rules above it! It's bad design all the way down, and a refusal to even look at the design and go "hang on a minute, this no longer lives up to the stated aim." It's the kind of Growth At All Costs mindset which is ruining the modern internet, destroying our planet, and which completely ignores the fact that it's really not ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hard to do better with the same resources.
Take it from me -- I'm not a Business Genius, I'm just a diagnosed autistic 30-year-old who's done a lifetime of pointless ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ jobs and who is good at spotting patterns -- the whole "we're wired for Number go Up" thing is a total load of rubbish! I mean, I like designing systems. I want to design complex factories, and refine my designs, and see better returns from them. But that's not what Satisfactory is! Satisfactory is a one-dimensional cookie clicker game wrapped up in the language of a factory game, but it's all just set dressing. There's no actual factory design under there! Because the machines Always Have To Run, there's no room to design systems that work like an actual factory. Forget about "realism", Satisfactory misses the most fundamental concept of engineering: designing something to solve a problem. What Satisfactory actually gives you is a bunch of solutions that are looking for problems -- it hands you a set of increasingly large hammers, and expects you to turn the rest of the world into a series of increasingly large nails in order to justify the existence of said hammers. Ignore the potential for any other kind of fasteners, or the fact that sometimes a bolt is just naturally gonna be a better solution; hammers are what you get and so nails are what you're gonna make!
It's arse-backwards design -- the machines came first, and then the problems they're meant to solve were shoehorned in (and not very well), and as soon as it became apparent that this wasn't a very fun combination, the devs turned around and shoehorned in a whole buttload of extrinsic motivation in order to ping the "monkey brains" of people who just don't know how to recognise a pointless ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ chore when they're pointed at one. Instead of adding interesting or complex interactions between the game mechanics, the devs simply added More to the target numbers; and then a very loud minority within the community ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ate that up, and praised it so loudly that it alienated most of the people who have alternative ideas.
Satisfactory could be a good factory game if people like yourself just stopped being so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ psychotic about your aversion to ever actually using the off switch on the machines. Letting the machines do their job and then turning them off is a good thing -- it means success! The job was finished! Keeping the machines running 24/7 means you've designed yourself into a system that can never achieve its goals, and requires all this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ like an ever-inflating currency of write-off tokens in order to justify its continued existence.
Instead of actually producing the parts you need to solve a problem, you're over-producing everything else, trashing the surplus, and saying "look how successful my design is! The number Keeps Going Up!" even though none of this ♥♥♥♥ helps directly to get closer towards the Project Assembly goal. At some point, after a billion other pointless chores, the fruits of those tokens will slightly help make the actual solutions for Project Assembly more efficient (by giving access to QoL things like wall mounted power)... but wasting all of those motors and computers and whatever else didn't actually help build any of that! The devs could just make wall mounted power sockets part of the power 2/3 milestone and skip all of the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥; they choose not to because they've invested themselves in keeping that number going up in order to satisfy the psychotic urge to never turn the machines off.
The TL;DR: here is that you don't understand the first thing about project management or efficient design, and you're using virtual tax write offs to make your failing (virtual) factory look like it's productive when all it's really doing is creating products that nobody wants nobody has a use for, and then immediately shredding them. I'd like to see you try that in a real factory game like, say, Opus Magnum, and see how far you get. I really ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hope that you have nothing to do with factories IRL -- and if you do, I pity everyone who has to put up with that kind of workplace that thinks that doing ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ pointless jobs just to make the Number go Up is somehow a good thing.
And quite obviously you first need to turn the copper ore into ingots before you can turn them into wire and not have it like ingots to ore to wire.
That linearity is also seen IRL too. In order to make Nitric acid you first make ammonia with the Haber-Bosch process (3 H₂ + N₂ -> 2 NH₃) and after purification of the ammonia you catalyticly burn it with excess Oxygen to get NO which is futher oxidised to NO₂ that is then dissolved in water to form Nitric acid and NO which is cycled back. This is what every production plant for Nitric acid is doing on this wold with only very minor variations (pressure, Oxygen content, temperature). While you can try to go from Nitrogen directly to NO your yield will be terrible and the product will be very expensive.
And to your "production straight into fire": Welcome to artificial scarcity. How do you think some brands are doing it? They are producing a lot and throw a ton of it away before shipping. Yes, this is actually happening. We actually managed to create a system in which it is cheaper to create a ton of stuff and throwing the majority away than to create only what is needed. Another IRL example of that is food waste. Good food getting thrown away because it isn't looking perfect enough.
Also, I'm going to ignore you ad hominem arguments here because I am not going down to that level of discussion.
Finally, it seems like this just isn't the game for you and you seem to hold some kind of grudge against it due to that. Move on. Holding a grudge against a game because it isn't what you thought it was is pointless. It just makes you go on lenghty discussions of how this is the worst game ever and no one could ever enjoy something like this. But I am here to tell you that no matter how wired you think something is, there will always be people that will enjoy it. The easiest thing is to just not care and move on.