The regular boiler is enabled by default in vanilla game, its like your character already know how to heat water to produce steam, the electric version is just a different fuel input that came after knowing how to make electricity automate your factory processes.
I mean, fluid-handling would be a tech that teaches you how to manipulate liquids and gases, from my logic thinking, so since I'm replacing hard coal with electric energy, that's not a fluid handling thingy, its an electronic upgrade thingy I think.
Since you won't be using electric boiler on early game anyways since it produces as much as it consumes, you would only want to use it for coal liquefaction, so I was thinking on maybe putting the boiler locked behind electronics 2 tech but that would make it be mid-late game where the boiler entity is a starter game thing, I don't know, what you think?