"The car has maddeningly terrible physics. The OP claims this yields "comic fun". It doesn't. It just means you're constantly crashing into trees and needing to repair the car."

I agree about the car physics, but there are mods which will let your car run over trees and rocks without taking damage. You still have to be careful about running in to parts of your base, but bots can almost instantly repair both your car and whatever you hit if you do hit it. Also, there are mods to make the car physics more realistic, but it's still a pain to drive... especially over a network in multi-player where there's lag.

"At some point I hit a biter nest I couldn't beat, couldn't go around (some sort of story based misson). There was NO way past this obstacle. No way to make the game easier, no way to beat them"

You can turn on peaceful mode, and various mods exist to reduce the difficulty of the biters.

"The GUI is terrible. I have no idea why he thinks it's good."

I love the GUI. I think it's really well done for a game of this complexity.

"Placing rails is an exercise in frustration because it's so easy to mis-align things and end up with two pieces of rail that don't quite line up, forcing you to then dig it all up and try again."

This is easily solved by copying and pasting already aligned portions of rails. Another way to do this is by clicking on the arrow at the end of a stretch of rails and that'll let you extend them and move them around without committing until you like the layout (kind of hard to explain with words, but it's very useful and I think it should eliminate any placing issues you have that you don't just want to use copy/paste for). Finally, there are rail blueprints you could use, and even automated blueprint placement (see the "recursive blueprints" mod) than can be programmed to be as precise as you want.

"The article cites "TIL I learned a shortcut" being a meme - that's because the GUI doesn't help you learn any shortcuts."

Not true. The game shows you tooltips when you hover over portions of the GUI, and those tooltips show shortcuts (if there are any). So there's definitely plenty of shortcut discoverability in this game. Also, if you look in the "Controls" settings, you can search for game features that have shortcuts. That's great for discoverability (though it would be even better if you could do a reverse-search by typing a shortcut and be shown which feature that shortcut activates, which Factorio can't do as far as I know).

"The icons are very small yet high detail, making them difficult to distinguish sometimes. There's no way to zoom anything to make this better. The colour schemes are washed out. The art is just unattractive."

I agree about the small, unzoomable icons, which can be a bit hard to read sometimes, but at least for me playing on 1920x1080 resolution, it's rarely a significant annoyance. Very rarely I need to know what something is and have a hard time figuring it out because of the size of the little icon.. and usually in those cases I can get more information on the entity by mousing over it or clicking on it. 99% of the time that's not an issue, though.

As for the art style.. yeah, it's pretty bland. There are some mods which enhance the art a bit, but I've yet to see something that makes the game really beautiful.

Fortunately, the sound effects in the game are pretty good, and somewhat make up for the lack of visual flare.

"Randomly generated maps mean you may often end up with an unusual shortage of resources, or things in weird locations."

There are a number of things you can do about this

First, you can preview maps and control various settings that affect the random placement of resources. If you don't like the way things are placed on a random map, you can try another.

Second, you can edit your own map and that way have no randomness at all, if you don't want it.

Third, you can use someone else's hand-edited map.

"Although I enjoyed making factories at first, I pretty quickly realised this was too much like programming to actually be enjoyable long term."

This is a matter of personal preference. Personally, I enjoy the similarity to programming, and actually find it less annoying and mind-numbing than ordinary programming. Factorio programming is more fun for me than regular programming (except for combinators and the circuit network, which really are super annoying for anything even moderately complex).

"Factories quickly end up drowning in 'tech debt' if you aren't experienced"

Well, that's where playing the game more helps.. just like in any game, you get better at it by playing.

"you're constantly tempted to restart levels and try again to make a more sustainable factory, but then you end up stuck again later when you obtain some new bit of tech and realise your factory is wrongly structured for the next part of the game again"

I find myself getting better and better at this each time I play, and when I watch videos of really expert players play the game I can see that much more sophisticated organization is possible.

"how do I learn how to use bots to do that?"

I'd encourage you to search on youtube for videos on any part of the game you struggle to understand. There are a wealth of tutorials on there.

Also, I can recommend the #factorio channel on the Esper IRC network, the Factorio forum and r/factorio on Reddit. There are many expert users on there who would be happy to help you.