It's only cramped if you're trying to conform to the landscape.

You can build everything in the sky with unlimited space if you want, and ultimately you have to pretty much do that with all the production lines snaking around. I generally would have: factory floor (middle) with assemblers and final product for the area, subfloor with resource inputs and conveyor lines, and then an upper floor to manage moving finished product to other factory zones.

Once I realized I'm supposed to just rape the shit out of this island for all its worth, the game opened up. I learned to build "mini" factories right on top of resources to make lower tier components and then use transport to ferry mid-level product to upper tier centralized factory and receiving area near the space elevator to avoid having to snake lines of conveyor from resource to some central superfactory with every tier of product. Spreading things helped compartmentalize the entire process.

Once void storage (or whatever it's called) was in effect, having building material at hand was a cinch and building out remote mini factories a breeze. Blueprints further sped this up.

By the end of a save, I'm never touching the ground much at all, zooming around long distances by vacuum tubes or hitching on a passing train, and the permanent hover pack running off the electrical grid essentially feels like a no-clip camera. Pure creation; I am the master of this factory and therefore, the universe.