"the UX has incredible amounts of well-thought out polish"
I agree so much with this. The UX seems so incredibly well thought out.. much more than virtually any game I've ever played.
There are some wrinkles and annoyances here and there, but virtually everything I've had complaints about while playing the vanilla game I found mods for later that solved it.
The only major complaint I still have about the UX of the game is the circuit network and combinators, which are a very clunky attempt at visual programming that don't provide enough feedback to keep from descending in to spaghetti code when doing something of even moderate complexity, and debugging these things is an absolute nightmare.
But the UX has incredible amounts of well-thought out polish. Different sized hitboxes for different components, often really favoring playability makes navigating bases really handy. Live map view with the ability to zoom into a location you're not currently near to get a real view of the factory at that point. Unrealistic long reach. Smart notifications on events happening in the base. Graphs diagramming pollution generation and electricity use by factory component type spanning the whole game period. Map layers showing which zones are protected by your defenses, or the extent of spread of pollution, or the routes and locations of your automated trains. And dozens of really useful shortcuts as mentioned.
The game would be perfectly playable without any of these and still be really fun but the love and attention put in by the devs is very clear. And the most amazing thing is seeing all of these things happening all at the same time with thousands of moving pieces updating at 60hz and the game still runs smooth as butter. As a developer I've been very impressed by how smoothly this game runs. And as a gamer I have seen much much simpler games put computers to the test to achieve much less.