I did a playthrough up to the rocket where I put all my production factories. With 16 factories, each with a significant amount of connections, I am getting about 2 ms/tick overhead in total. Yeah, it's really not insignificant. Note that only the total number of factories and connections is important to performance, no matter how deep they are nested (although nested factories would have more connections than usual, of course). So yeah, if you're experiencing UPS issues with regular Factorio, then this mod will reduce your UPS by another say 30% if you put absolutely everything in factories. But I do believe a decent PC could handle at least 50 factories just fine without slowing down the game. And unless you're building a super-compact megabase, or using a bunch of big mods without using modules, I doubt you'll even come close to 50 factories. So you know what, how about you just try it out, and if it really doesn't work then just come back here and complain.