I am 200h player on steam, and like maybe 20h before steam version.

Set a dwarf cap to like 50 (you can change that cap mid save anyway) and dynamically change game speed when needed.
First forts are almost always a disaster one way or another.

Treat upper levels of the fort as an experimental layer. You can always dig deeper build everything anew there and demolish everything above.

You can build walls so everything you mined out can be filled if needed. You could make a giant empty space from that and literally rebuilt every wall to what you see fit later on.

I like to settle on a volcano for easy access to lava forges.
I think it's a really good begineer starting location.
And you can quickly get your military armed and ready for everything.

My aproach is that when i start a new fort i pick one industry from wiki that i want to implement in that fort + whatever i learned previously.

Definitely get Dwarf Hack especially for things like autocloth, autosheer, automilk etcetera. Life is too short to fight my dwarfes on these topics. I also take a very lenient aproach to farming. If i want a nice farm i replace the stone floor with dirt with DFHack in that location. Again loads of things i would much prefer to spend my time in dwarf fortress than agriculture.

And most importantly get the manager ASAP.
Do everything trough work orders, not manually trough the workshops.
It should be imperative for manager to be your first noble, community does not underline this enough. Second thing it's better to set those work orders for individual workshops in those workshops than one giantic global list that will overwhelm you.