That makes sense. I guess I just had a different approach when I played the other games. The way I organized in other factory games is that the considerations of input and output were things that I thought of upfront - I never eyeballed and then tried to estimate the production speed based on how fast my resources were drained. I might be overplanning, or maybe Factorio encourages a far more chaotic approach, but I always treated factories as black boxes that take X/s of certain items and outputted X/s results. Knowing precisely how many items per second I have on any individual belt is the most essential piece of knowledge to me, so I never relied on buffering and always made sure to build consumer factories that never overwhelmed producer factories. This means that the visual indication of the buffer draining would only signal some building mistake to me, rather than a design mistake.
