it's that in Factorio there are no problems with phase synchronization, and the devices, consumers, producers, so the machines don't get damaged from a lot of abrupt starting/stopping.
still, it's strange that operators and grid controllers have to do the restart manually.
Dyson sphere program is the by far most forgiving in that regard. You can overdraw to something like 200% before it becomes really problematic, and even that quickly resolves itself the moment you get more power online
Same thing with all the coal burning... how does that coal get ignited? Do we secretly have an infinite lighter in our pocket? Are we rubbing sticks together but not showing it for the sake of gameplay?
In satisfactory, all pumps need water and there is a special kind of power plant that doesn't need pumps/electricity to kickstart the factory. It's special because it needs items the player has to manually gather and only runs "on demand" (shuts off if enough power from regular plants is provided)
Strong recommendation to give it a try if you haven't already. It's very different to factorio, but great in it's own way
My girlfriend had more fun collecting leaves for the biomass burners and playing the tetris game in the workshop while I built the conveyors and calculated ratios... I let her keep adding leaves even once we were burning coal, but she eventually noticed leaves weren't burning anymore :)
In Space Age, more than once I've needed to fly across the solar system to hand-restart a generator when I didn't have my fail-safe setup correctly. Normally I setup a SR latch to fall back to the power generators (whatever type they are) _only_ on a sub-grid when capacity falls below 20% (and alert me) since if you lose power completely, hand-feeding is the only way to fix (unless you have another air-gapped power storage/generation set up). It sucks when you hand-feed and then see all your power generation still struggling because you accidentally left in 1 copper wire to a pole outside your "air-gapped" grid. Having to slowly rebuild on Aquilo solar->nuclear->fusion is tedious, after making that mistake once I make sure I didn't have to travel back again to fix the grid... After the 2nd time it happened I finally fixed it for good.
During that time, you are producing power, but none of the inserters work, none of the miners work, etc. and the distributed nature of the roboports means it isn’t straightforward to simply disconnect them.