Thinking back to the newbie experience, there is a way you could extend the tutorial to cover in-sector survival.
Currently the tutorial has you clear out of Galatia and deliver a message to Corvus, then you get some text and are left to fend for yourself.
Right there, on delivery of that message there is the opportunity to offer some additional guidance to show the player how to make money and accumulate fuel & supplies.
Upon accepting said offer, a few suitable missions could be generated as needed to walk the player through what kind of missions they need to look for and where, and what they need to do in order to complete them.
Maybe have the player take one kind of mission, complete it then return for the next. So they have some idea of what to do, and some experience to help them decide what they prefer.
I dislike level scaling in Starsector now because it is too fast
Kind of agree. But just ditch level caps entirely tbh.
With the current scaling it's hard to go much past 60 anyway (unless you play literally all day every day). And letting the player accumulate a few extra skills for putting that kind of effort/time in is not exactly game breaking.
Even if you got to 96 and unlocked every single skill currently available, it wouldn't give the player enough of an advanatge to roll the game over and become a minor god like previous versions.
tl;dr - remove the hard level cap, and let player patience be the soft cap.