It also impressively shows the other side of things, where you can keep your factory running on hotfixes until pretty much the end of the game.
You can most certainly launch a rocket (i.e. ship your final product) with any kind of setup but if you want to build a sustainable rocket launching platform, you will most likely have to nuke production (as in, you can literally nuke your production) and re-build it.
Nuking your starter base is silly unless you're on death world and have some impenetrable defense set up that's hard to attain elsewhere without significant work. Usually to start a fresh megabase you just load up a car and drive a couple minutes to a new location. Then you can keep supplying the construction materials of the megabase with your starter base. (To those unfamiliar: yes, "the end of the game" -- launching a rocket -- is really the start of the game to seasoned players, so the initial base you launch the first rockets with is commonly called the starter base.)
The starter base is probably a UPS sink. Nuke that trash, it's not worth the flock of construction robots to disassemble it.
The point of the late late game is to minimize UPS (updates per second). It becomes memory bandwindth bound at some point. It demonstrates what's possible with today's technology. In comparison, Microsoft Word can not keep up with my typing in a new, blank document.
A starter base on the order of up to say 100-200 spm usually doesn't have much of a ups impact at all in my experience but I guess it could be on wimpier hardware. Or if you rely too heavily on logistics robots, but I think people usually don't go mass logistics until later.
I haven't played in a long while and never quite got a rocket launched(can't recall why). Any tips for getting to that point very fast without feeling like cheating the phase?
You can most certainly launch a rocket (i.e. ship your final product) with any kind of setup but if you want to build a sustainable rocket launching platform, you will most likely have to nuke production (as in, you can literally nuke your production) and re-build it.