Thank you for playing!
The risk of exponential growth is, or at least was intended to be, the real point of the game. It was extremely intentional on my part that a small slip up early on leads to total doom (and I experienced this myself while playtesting). Moreover, I broadly figured the best gameplay arc would be: player slips up, loses, restarts, and then wins. I guess the idea is: I wanted this game to demonstrate just how scary exponential growth is.
(I originally thought I might title the game something like "fragile defense" to try to communicate how... well... fragile your defense necessarily is against exponential self-replication. Unfortunately I also had recently set myself the goal of making a game with a really long title 😄)
The language about good ship coordination, and what not, is really also about destroying the enemies before they start replicating.
So depending on what exact kind of difficulty unbalance you experienced, it may be completely intended. Of course, even if the unbalance is intentional, it still might be bad. I personally think I like the idea still, but YMMV. 😄
One side note: enemies shouldn't be spawning while the tutorial is open. If they were that's a bug. Also, for reading the ship "info" screens, it should be possible to do that while paused--but this is only communicated in the game description so it may be easily missed.
Thank you for the feedback!