As opposed to so many takes on "flow based" programming, which present some imperfect nodal representation of the program, but rarely can the user make sense of what's going on by seeing stuff moving around as the thing executes.
And by the way, be sure you're ready to sink some time in if you're curious about this game...it's just too good, and I've had to consciously reduce the time I'm spending, because I could just keep optimizing...building...expanding...optimizing...it's built in the shape of the reward center of my brain.
I haven't played Factorio but this article GIFs helped me understand it, at least from a high level simplistic perspective!
I think most of programming is just logistics: moving data from one place to another, picking and choosing what fields to use for a given purpose and then calling a function with those selected parameters or talking to another system.
I am working on a number of experiments in this area. I'm working on a programming environment which is unlike programming languages where you specify instructions and the state is implied but you work directly with state and instructions are implied.
The problem with nodal editors is that they're not very information dense.