TLDR: By no means is the game shallow.
My first two runs were fairly short lived affairs as I was getting a feel for the game. Third run I made it for a while, had the basics down, then I ran out of algae for my oxygen production because I hadn't transitioned into electrolyzers yet. Panicked and started mass mining algae in the nearest swamp biome, oblivious to the fact that I was tracking slimelung into my base en masse, which eventually ravaged my dupes and caused me to pull the plug.
Latest run I'm almost to cycle 300, probably going to start a new one tomorrow as this one has been a non-stop roller-coaster and I'm not sure if I can get ahead long enough to go self-sustaining before I deplete too many resources. I started off a lot more slowly so that I wouldn't have to worry about various shortages, made sure I was ready to transition into electrolyzers well before I ran out of algae. You can't avoid the swamp entirely because you really need gold amalgam for some of your hotter operating machines, so I constructed an elaborate two-level airlock entrance to the nearest swamp biome. Main level is wash basins, water lock, ore scrubbers, entrance to the sub level, and then the dual airlock doors leading out to the swamp itself, with two air scrubbers between the airlock doors. Sublevel is for storage, so anyone who comes in for something mined from the swamp has to carry it back out past the ore scrubbers. Both levels are filled with chlorine so that slimelung can't survive in the air, and the permissions on the doors are set so that only one or two dupes can go into the swamp, so I don't have to worry about too many dupes passing the wash basins at the same time to use them and letting slimelung sneak in that way.
Unfortunately what I didn't consider was that due to the size of my airlock setup and the position of the swamp biome I picked, I practically bisected my base, which dramatically increased the travel time between the living/farming area up above and the industrial area down below. Also although the central biome starts out temperate, heat from the other biomes will gradually seep into your base so even if you build your high heat producing a ways away from your central area, the whole thing will eventually heat up to the point that you can't grow simple crops. I noticed my farm rooms were starting to fail due to getting too hot so I frantically started setting up a new farming area right beside a cold biome. This worked out quite well until my new farm started to fail because the simplest plant to farm consumes 10kg of dirt every time you harvest it, and I had gone through all the dirt just like I did with the algae in the previous game. I start switching the farm to bristle berries and also start a new farming area inside the cold biome itself. I successfully get this set up, right about the time I run out of coal, which I was burning for power. I hadn't been paying good attention to my hatches so too many of them died to be able to set up a good coal pasture, so I set up a petroleum generator. Shortly afterwards I noticed my bristle berry farm was starting to fail due to more heat creep, so I set up some thermo regulators to try and pump cooled air up there, which worked except I accidentally built them out of iron instead of gold so they overheated super easily and instead of just quickly deconstructing them and building new ones out of gold, I kept dicking around with a setup to cool them back off.
And since I just realized how goddamn long this is dragging on, I'll also say that at one point I accidentally shut down my entire oxygen flow from installing a single backwards gas pipe bridge, the industrial area underneath my base is a twisted nightmare of liquid/gas pipes, power cables, and a ton of ladder sections used like scaffolding, and it's completely drowning in carbon dioxide because I didn't realize how much co2 a petro generator (plus some other stuff) shits out and the single carbon scrubber i had down there was completely overwhelmed. I've still got more than enough resources that I could probably keep things together long enough to reach the self-sustaining dream, but I think it would be better to start fresh again.