I might recommend an extra tradition set around reducing pop upkeep and allowing for more energy production a sort of second ascension tree in a way, as well as further boosting the traits you get on your leaders (something like a "gamer" trait, where it's lentioned that the leaders are trained on thousands of hours of simulation to find ways to optimize their performance), reducing empire size when working trade jobs (kinda like how investors nowadays put alot of money into researching ways to have faster connection speeds with less latency, or maybe allowing a type of repeatable tech to be reasearched, that would decrease empire size), a traition that gives additional energy for pops working in energy jobs (since you already need more energy, having more can't hurt) and maybe a decrease in the cost of infrastructure/ships (since for now, there are very few ways to decrease ship cost, plus your entire empire being wired directly on the same network, means that they have the ability to shuffle ressource mre efficiently all the while requiring less space/room for parts that were once vital to their physical frame's safety)
although by this point, I might be asking too much for a simple production mod.

I'd recommend changing the debuff to something like the buildings having diminishing returns (give fewer bonuses the more are built while still costing the same amount to run), or changing them to not discount the entire planet (like 1/2 or 3/5 of the cost)