Im on my third serious attempt and i can't get past this point. It's like there is no room to breathe in this mod. You either ruthlessly advance or get stalled completely with complaints.
I tried rushing tech only to run short on resources and in another run rushed solar to limit pollution, but it made no difference.

For me its almost like playing on deathworld. Don't know how to get over it. I thought killing nests would help, but evo comes from pollution generated, not absorbed by nests.

I would really appreciate having a way to stabilize the game, perhaps by postponing new complaints by having them unlock when researched and not when evo hits a certain number. Like if you want new tech you need to take a hit in form of complaints that come alongside it.

Or maybe i just don't know how to play this mod, given how no else seems to complain about it

I hear you, and this was a major pain point for multiple people (including me) for a long time, as well as a "broken" mechanic. Initially I thought that evolution would go slow enough because you don't destroy nests and that would give enough time to scale up the factory but the mod adds too much complexity to do that in a relaxed manner, and I like my factorio relaxed.

But I think I cracked it finally, I've been thinking about this for a while and Ive come up with I think a good compromise. Evolution now stops at certain values until you unlock the next enemy level via a research. That means that until you research it, you won't get any enemies above what you can handle, meaning that you can spend as much time a you like before taking on the next challenge, but now base game progression is locked behind those updates so you'll have to get them anyways.

Let me know what you think of this design, it's in 0.6.11 !