I looked again at the start of the game and the repairing of broken machines that was added. It indeed helps give incentive to build intermediate stuff.

Most of the time you get a tech that gives you an item and unlocks a repair that uses said item. But some repair recipes seem to be unlocked by the wrong technology:

• Water plant repair is unlocked by Water flitration 1 but needs pipes from Plumbing 1.
• Air filter repair is unlocked by Air separation but needs iron sheets from Iron working 1.
• Priority electrolyzer repair is unlocked by Electrolysis but needs iron wire from Iron working 2.

Those kind of make sense as the building relates to the tech directly but maybe still think about it. The water plant is probably most noticeable because it's so early.

• Grid battery repair is unlocked by Carbon sequestration 1 but needs graphite from Carbon sequestration 2.

That one really makes no sense at all.

Patching up old things is much easier to figure out than building whole new ones from scratch. The point of these repair technologies is to motivate people to get through the tech tree and influence their decisions about which technologies to research in which order. So you may get the repair recipe before the prerequisites in order to make an informed decision about what you should be researching.

If all new players looked ahead and were very familiar with the tech tree already, then you wouldn't really need broken recipes in the first place, because they'd all know exactly what to do to prepare for later techs and keep busy while researching them. But they don't, so some players were complaining that there was nothing to do until all the early tech was fully unlocked, because they hadn't researched the recipes to know what to plan for. Well repair recipes were added to give players like that shorter term goals to help proceed through the tree with less idle time. And players like that aren't going to know which techs to research to fix things until they actually have the recipe in front of them. Thus they get access to the recipe in some cases before making the decision about what to research.

Yes, that was me complaining.

And "players like this" will get very frustrated if they see the broken grid battery, see the grid battery repair recipe unlocked in Carbon sequestration 1, research Carbon sequestration 1 so they can repair their broken grid batteries and then they can't. Carbon sequestration 1 doesn't have anything to do with grid batteries. It makes no sense that knowledge about carbon monoxide would allow you to repair grid batteries with graphite, if only you had graphite.

For the first three there at least is some connection between the tech and the entity but the last truly makes no sense.

I would move them all though since as you say: "Patching up old things is much easier". You don't need knowledge about water filtration to repair the broken pipe in the water plant. You only need the pipe.