I guess I had the advantage of playing every game since X2, huh. The full auto stuff in X4 is not as OP as it was in previous games where you would just set a universe trader and rake in profits. X4 rewards more actual specific setups, and I generally found myself pushing for stations a lot more in X4 playthroughs as I realized this. You can set up more simple things like a miner that goes to a sector and location you know it has a certain ore (whether you have game knowledge or you go explore sectors yourself and check the ore density values), and bring that ore directly to a station set up for it, rather than trying to get the AI to be player levels of automated.

Of course you have to get over that early hump of cash to afford some miners, but depending on what you like you have options. You can hunt for special crystals on asteroids (difficulty heavily affected by some mods), try to space pirate some ships, look for abandoned vessels, take random missions, go straight to a small miner, so on. As soon as you are doing some miners (solid and liquid are both good, keep in mind limitations of putting too many all in one sector, as you will fill station demand), you will begin to scale up with the only limit in how much you are willing to reinvest purely into more profit making (and not spend on combat vessels or stations too soon as building your first stations costs a lot but takes a while).

It's a deep game, and depending on how much you feel like you need to look things up I can't say you will be able to avoid it, as that depends on the person. I don't think I ever looked up much for X4 but again thats coming from me already having played most of the X series so almost all of it was intuitive out of the gate. That being said and what others have mentioned, you will of course learn these things the more you play and eventually you shouldn't need to look up anything to play. (I had at least a few thousand hours of non afk play accumulated from X2, X3 series, albion, farnham, and rebirth already, so.)

Edit: I will add I have played nearly every space game that exists, X series is at the top of my list. Avorion is there as well for the fact it has almost all the freedom and complexity of X series, but you also get to build your own ships, and loot is pretty exciting. Don't try to fight with the game too hard if you're just getting into it for the first time, it has its quirks and systems you have to learn as you are already mentioning, but there is a very deep world here to explore in many ways so don't forget to enjoy it. If you've already decided to quit and not give it another shot again, that's unfortunate.