I have a very loving, painful, beautiful, agonizing relationship with this game.
For each thing that I'm frustrated I *can't* do in this game, and feels like it should be a feature, it'll offer me two things that I never imagined a game would be insane enough to let me do, and I end up forgiving it.

If you've ever played something like Sprocket, or just have an autistic engineer's brain (like me), then the part designer in this game will be possibly the best you've ever seen. It has the thousandths-of-a-millimetre precision of Sprocket or even *actual* engineering software, as well as full physics simulation that allow crazy IRL things to actually happen. For example; there is no Orion drive in the game (A nuclear pulse engine, where you use miniature nuclear bombs as 'fuel'), BUT the physics engine actually allows you to build one piece by piece - and it works.

To be fair, its still scuff as hell at times - but most space games WISH they had physics this solid. I stepped into things being totally overwhelmed (Scott Manly's YT series is a good tutorial for the missions; use that if you're stuck), but weeks later and 130 hours and now I find myself looking at schematics for real-world nuclear reactors and much better understanding what I'm looking at.
It's a little bit overwhelming, and you WILL spend at least a week trying to learn how to build things like railguns and nuclear warheads, etc... But you'll get it. All the base-game items are horribly inefficient designs too, as you'll quickly figure out, and begin dominating the AI.

What you'll also have to get though, is figure out how to work around some of the quirks of the game. Like, you can't put multiple guidance methods on missiles. There's ONLY heat seeking, because the dev though that was the 'most efficient' in terms of weight, despite that making a setting where EVERY countermeasure is made to counteract infrared homing, and instead you could just slap one radar receiver on a missile and defeat every countermeasure... Basically they came at things with an engineer's mindset, and not a military or space-faring one. It's manageable, just a little odd sometimes. The amount of stuff you CAN do still outshines what you can't at every turn, and half the things that felt like they were "missing" have been added with mods. Seriously, get the future materials mod - it adds fusion drives, for the proper Expanse feel.

The only part that's really "bad" is the course plotting between celestial bodies. It's unambiguously trash; fiddly, inefficient, and really *really* could have used an autopilot, so we could focus more on strategy and where to go, and not spend 10 minutes chasing pixels to get there, only to find out later you don't have enough Delta V or acceleration to overcome a nearby gravity well, and can't enter orbit... With no mid-mission save function. It's everything that was wrong with KSP's burn planning, but somehow worse, and without an autopilot mod.

If you can stomach that and a few quirks, the rest is not only amazing, but there's no other game that comes close to replicating it. KSP with BD Armoury mods has never really figured out space combat, compared to planes - but this laser focuses down the topic in a way nothing ever has.