@Alex; I personally found Starsector's fairly challenging economic profile (at the start of the game anyway) made it more challenging in an interesting way. Since your supplies and fuel are always ticking down, it strongly encourages you to figure out a stable income stream, and keeps the pressure on in a way that drives gameplay and decision-making. I believe it is a bit intense at start, but not problematically so as you learn the mechanics and the economy. In fact, the game can almost become a bit too easy/slow-paced later, when your income starts drastically exceeding your costs (basically, as soon as your colony is up and running in the black) and you have more money coming in than you have things to do with it.
That said, I do agree that more alerts/notifications related to supply management are definitely warranted. The big one that gets me too often is large, unnoticed spikes in supply consumption - for post-battle repairs or due to star corona impact. These jumps can happen so quickly and silently that I don't even realize I'm about to run out until it's too late; an alert for when supply consumption rates exceed some relative threshold, or when ship repairs/CR recovery are actively taking place, or when supplies get below some minimum baseline reserve, would be incredibly useful. I would want some form of all the above.
I know there are some visual cues for some of these kinds of situations (and the "in a corona" audio SFX is there, but while it adds ambiance, I want another sound added as an alert, since by itself it's not that attention-grabbing), but audio cues would add a lot of value, and the alerts don't always cover the situations that are actually the most dangerous to your fleet. Running out of supplies is incredibly dangerous and crippling, vastly moreso than running out of fuel (since you can wait for more fuel if you have supplies to hold out, but NOT the other way around!), and usually requires a highly focused emergency response from the player to avert disaster (hull damage, lost ships, lost cargo, increased combat risk, etc); so it should be very clear when a supply burnout is at risk of happening. It can easily mean the end of a run, if you're unlucky.
I could say some similar things about low fuel awareness and notifications, but supply consumption awareness is definitely the bigger problem.