I would absolutely recommend taking time to get comfortable with blueprints, they've been a huge timesaver for me. I just got my 600 caterium ingot factory up and running. Took me about 15 minutes to build, connect and wire 50 refineries. They don't look pretty but I don't care about pretty. If I wanted to make them pretty I could always build a building around the blueprint.

I also have blueprints for smelters, foundries, constructors, assemblers and manufacturers. All of them running vertically so whenever I need to scale up the production I just build my towers higher and the only manual things I do are connecting the wire between 2 blueprinted parts and connecting the inputs and outputs. Eventually I'll hit the belt limit, but then I'll just start a new tower next to the original one. I have also made blueprints for blenders and refineries but those expand horizontally and I'm not 100% happy with them, but they're still better than manually building them.

I think I've saved tenfold the time I spent figuring out good blueprints and it has taken off a huge mental load of factory maintenance because everything is built using the exact same style so it's pretty simple to understand what is going on in any of my blueprinted factories.