I do somewhat agree with your takes, and I think I either need to lean more into the automation, or lean out of it. I actually added the filter conveyor last minute, because after doing some playthroughs I had assumed that people would want to automate the game a bit more. But overall, I tried to design the game to be more like overcooked (manually keeping track of many moving tasks) instead of Factorio. Although I don't think I hit the perfect mark that overcooked does to keep it fun and not tedious.
Thanks for the detailed feedback!