There is something funky happening between Krastorio2 and Space Exploration. I was finally able to get the game to load up, after commenting out one single line (copying the science pack requirements of automation to reverse-factory-1).
I loaded in, checked the tech tree and noticed that for some reason, both Space Exploration and Krastorio2 were affecting the technologies that correspond to the reverse factories. The 3 that I hadn't touched were working perfectly, copying the costs from their prereq techs, and for some reason, reverse factory 1 had a new requirement for the red chips (one tier above the basic gray chips)
I thought maybe I could remove that tech pack requirement in data-final-fixes, instead of data-updates, but that somehow made a different technology loop, this time with automation-2 instead of automation?! No idea how or why that happened, but I think both of the other mods have some kind of logic that changes how technologies and recipes are handled, and they don't like me copying the requirements from other technologies.
So I just gave up and left it in the one working configuration. The t1 recyclers are somewhat more expensive to research than automation, requiring red chips and more time, but at least the game actually loads now. And every other tier of recycling technology works as intended.
tl;dr Should be fixed as of v7.0.5
