I find the Copper Alloy Ingot recipe to be the best approach. They’re somewhat less resource-efficient than Pure ingots, but the infrastructure is much more manageable, both because there’s no dealing with fluids and because Foundries are so much smaller than Refineries.

edit: and I mean way smaller. My Nuclear Pasta factory produces 3,000 Copper Ingots per minute using 36 Foundries at 100% clock rate. To produce the same amount using the Pure recipe, I’d need 96 Refineries.

96 Refineries take up 21,120 m² of space, ignoring pipes and belts. The Foundries take up just 3,240 m².

I almost quit then too. I eventually built a huge copper mine for just producing copper powder and conveying it to my main factory. It still was a struggle until I maxed all my production out there.

IMO there’s a few recipes that are fairly big momentum killers in Satisfactory. Factory games are probably my favourite genre and I love so many parts of satisfactory but I always hit a point in a playthrough that makes me quit (funnily enough, it’s often not the same item that makes me quit).