Foundry is fun! But why the inserters so big? And the ramp conveyors. Such big ramps.
I realize it seems silly to say this compared to Satisfactory where everything is extra huge, but I think everything being on the grid in Foundry makes me want to make everything super compact, but the need to have at least a 2 square buffer around the buildings on a side where you need to have loader + conveyor makes that a lot harder than it feels like it should be.
Thinking on it now I think I'm most directly comparing the sizes to Dyson Sphere Program and the way the Sorters in there work, where they kind of attach "in" to the building, so you can have your belt lines right next to the building. Or if there was a way to insert the product from one assembler directly to another when you're doing component parts of someting, that'd really help a lot too. Since the most compact way to do that I've seen is in a 3x3 space with a belt snaking between.
i treat it as a puzzle to solve really - wouldn't say no to dyson sphere style inserters but my understanding is it's a technical limitation of the game's framework - the loader needs an actual unique voxel assigned to it for the game to properly save its position due to the way the game stores things (which is similar to Factorio actually)
in any case you can still get ultra-compact layouts with a little ingenuity
couple of my favs from the steam guide:
outside of the spacing between the columns and between the crushers/smelters (although you DO need 1 space there so the raw ore rubble doesn't make it onto the output belts) this is as compact as smelting will ever go
concrete setup that takes only raw resources, square footprint, tileable as well, concrete/min calibrated to 16/min SP3