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.