Yeah, I felt the same ad you until I found out the opt in part.
As far as I understand, the only way to get above default base quality is to first create the new modules that will give you a chance of increased quality items, kickstarting a feedback loop of quality items.
But as long as you have base quality materials and base quality machines you get base quality results.. So I think I'm on board, but it was the weirdest update I've seen so far for Factorio
I looked into this last week for recurring tasks in an actix-web project and ended up picking fang, but haven't really battle tested it.. But seems to do what I need. I'm using cron tasks with Postgres as the backend to run a recurring task every minute.