Not sure about resources being further apart, and agree about new players. However it's well known that your starting area can have an immense impact on the game difficulty.

The random map generation is not the ideal experience for new players. Most of them are fine, but sometimes you get accidental hard mode from no trees or cut-off starting resources or oil being super far away. And the solution is hitting the new seed button.

Mineral patches are farther apart, but much richer. The starting patches will have a few thousand units, ones that require a train ride to get to will have millions of tens of millions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqJ3Vx6tdbc

One build style has you rushing to decent weapons, then walking far from spawn to set up your main base, so you don't have to bother with trains to get up to rockets. (The patches are randomly placed and don't have exclusion zones, so it's not impossible to see a 10M iron, copper, coal and oil all next to each other.)

I will note that getting to the rocket launch stage only requires 3-5 patches outside the starting area and you can very easily reach that with belts. Trains are for going big or simply because you like them.

I simply like them. I always play a train world, rush train tech, and have my trains handle everything. Much more fun than belts.

This RSO is specifically a mod that uses its own resource generation system. (Also incompatible with map preview !)