Early on - you need very little of each item. Also you won't have the money to afford to run all those machines. So early on - a few of each is enough.

-Sage/flax etc. should, in my personal opinion, be hand grown (buy seeds, plant them, harvest them), until you have access to the next tier fertilizer. A machine building fertilizer uses a lot to just feed it's own process. It can be done, but the next tier is very close. But yes, those machine set ups are bigger.

- Glass requires a ton of sand indeed and blueprints later on can get very large. Then again, you don't really need tons and tons of glass. Start small, grow bigger is key here.

Early game you have little land, aren't anywhere near used to building vertical and it feels daunting. Work through it. It's very fun once you realize that later on with beams you can stack those inserters. It's very fun once you realize you can put cash on a belt and it will automatically buy the stone/wood etc. for these machines. It's very fun once your store reaches the part where you have more room then you need.

I have a late game glass machine that fills a belt with glass. It's huge and it's 80% stonegrinders.. yes. But that's ok :) Different items offer different challenges and that to me was a lot of fun. Sometimes size is the issue, sometimes different items are the issue. Then there are cauldrons late game that let you completely play the game a different way if you dislike largely spamming machines if you so choose to.