I agree that the visual style was not for me. I had a much better time with satisfactory, which is quite pretty. It also spares you the threat of factory destruction.
I'm currently at a couple hundred hours into Factorio and I can safely say I like it better. It is way more polished and way more in-depth. It has definitely had much more time to mature and respond to user feedback. Also the threat level keeps it more interesting. But I do find Satisfactory much more beautiful, and I think the idea of having belts go directly into/out of buildings, etc, without the need for inserters, a much better style than inserters.
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/loaders-modernized or https://mods.factorio.com/mod/vanilla-loaders-hd or this one made by a Wube developer: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/aai-loaders
This is not helped by the fact that Coffee Stain has been aggressively anti-QoL as they developed the game. They absolutely refused to put any sort of blueprint feature or tool to speed up placing foundation for the longest time. Then when they finally added those things, the features sucked compared to what players had done with mods because they were so crippled. Then in 1.0 they finally grudgingly added slightly bigger blueprints, which are inexplicably locked behind high tier tech, and they actually make fun of the player for daring to want blueprints that don't suck. It's just baffling how hostile the developers have been to making the building part of the game (which is by far the biggest part) user-friendly.
In their defense, Coffee Stain/Satisfactory makes fun of the player for absolutely everything. They always have. It's just the culture of their studio.