There is a way to approach the game to let you have 3D walking simulator with the least resource farming. Start in regular, as survival’s main “challenge” is smaller inventory, which sounds like it will annoy you more than challenge you anyway.
Do the main quest which is mostly intro/tutorial until you have access to the Anomaly, which is quite fast, and then proceed until you warp in to a new system and are in a battle to defend a capitol ship. For the least fuss, just take this ship. If you want to set yourself up better, turn it down and do more warp/exploring until you are given a second battle. Take the second ship. The first one is random. The second one is always one of the two larger models. They just have more starting space.
All ships are upgradable in inventory space now. If you like the game, you’ll want to figure out how to get a freighter to your tastes and with max upgradability. But for now, you don’t care, you just want “a freighter”. If you find a crashed regular ship, only repair it enough to get it to launch so you can sell it. They take a lot of mats to fully repair, and you sound like avoiding that to start is the right thing. Better to sell it for cash to buy first inventory upgrades and then items you prefer not to farm.
This is the most important step: Do the quests on the freighter to get a frigate fleet that can do afk missions for you. They bring in enough cash once you get that ball rolling that you can just buy whatever resources you like for the most part. Use most of your early cash to buy more frigates to get fleet missions rolling. Missions from the space stations can also get you starting cash. Start looking into depot raiding as a hobby, and sell those items too. Spend it all on base inventory slots and more frigates at the start.
When you have spare cash to buy resources, NPC ships in both space stations and planetside trading posts all will happily trade with you. Start checking out which sell what types of items. There are also random events where a ship that wants to trade land near you planetside. And Inhabited outposts have the trade com, and there are random trade coms in the wild. Buying resources is rarely a problem once you have the inventory to hold them and the cash to buy them.
You can also now buy technology at the Anomaly with a currency you’ll have to dig up, literally. And you can get upgrade doodads for your freighter by pirate activities. So work on unlocking all related to inventory upgrade items and tech for freighter inventory and base inventory asap. Some tech items allow for passive inventory transfer and make life nicer. There is also the grind for upgrading the base slot count in the freighter and suit inventories. One involves mini-ship dungeons, the other is just grind but you can buy some with money. And having the frigate fleet going helps there too.
Then I’d keep loosely following the main quest, as it acts as a tutorial. Two branches involve combat intro. Also start doing missions from the Anomaly as soon as you can. One mission type is combat. Grinding Anomaly missions gets you a time constrained currency, but also randomly useful items. You should then quickly have less painful inventory and the ability to buy resources you don’t feel like faffing about harvesting due to the frigates funding you. Often you can get the rare farmed mat to make the tech upgrade you just bought from an Anomaly mission.
By this point you’ll have your own opinions on what you like and feel like doing.
I can’t be sure you’ll like the game. But going about setting up with these early goals should have your first run allowing you to just buy and not gather as much a possible and allow you to get items with combat where possible.