It's probably more related to the fact that the basic building blocks in Factorio are much higher level than in Minecraft. You create these out of wires (adders

It's probably more related to the fact that the basic building blocks in Factorio are much higher level than in Minecraft. You create these out of wires (adders), arithmetic combinators (any other arithmetic operator), and decider combinators (comparisons). Additionally, you have 2 "channels" for data (red and green wires), and "data" is actually a vector of numbers (since each wire carries a "count" for each "item type").