I usually play ironman at this point unless I'm doing something whacky, and it definitely takes some adjustment to get used to because a full wipe is awful. On the other hand, rolling with the punches and overcoming adversity is so much more fun than just snowballing up to endgame in a series of easy battles, at least for me. Managing sensor radius (and what terrain one is in) and burn speed is even more important than before, as is outfitting early game ships to be able to run away well (Dram with Militarized Subsystems, SO, and UI goes fast!). Keeping a small set of backup ships either in abandoned storage or at the colony in case of emergency is very useful to accelerate a restart/patch holes in the fleet when things go bad, as is keeping a moderate credit reserve. I think everyone knows about my love of industry recovery skills at this point so I won't get into that again.
Getting storm ganked is rough! When travelling through storms I usually have a finger over emergency burn for just that reason, but sometimes its the enemy ships that get catapulted straight at you at 30 speed, and there's no escaping that (looking at you, wandering sub ordo with a radiant that ended my 'start with a buffalo mk II' challenge run on the way to my first named bounty. That was game over, no buffer of ships or money built up and that battleship is faster than a BMII!).
I actually really love escape battles, even though by definition its a bad situation that will probably lose ships. Desperately trying to save as many ships as possible, even ordering some ships to just be suicide delay boats, is a very different type of gameplay; the variety is nice. And when the fleets are too large to run away, you just have to hold on and do enough damage to the enemy, and then you can full retreat out of the battle in order to do a retreat.