Anyone making this claim just hasn't played a lot of factorio, because this just isn't true. Player feeding is fast in the early game, but it just doesn't scale. There's too many buildings to feed and it takes too long to walk between them. People have already made tool assisted speedruns, and as expected it involves building a huge automated factory as quickly as possible.
I played Factorio quite a bit..
I said it's plausible. Perhaps not for basic materials, but things like robot frames, higher tier research packs, modules, anything that has low component amount compared to time or amount required for crafting.
Even speedrunners do quite a bit of handfeed. And if AI/player cannot figure out the automation fast enough - the handfeed might easily come on top.