I think that's just there to make some sense lore wise (and I love it), salvage skills however, should probably bring back the good old rare finds though. You don't really earn good money through salvage, it's mostly there to support your survey/scan missions and your search for sweet sweet rare items and blueprints.
Salvage skills could even be about finding more clues about hidden stashes of goodies and the like. Salvage is about the joy of exploration and discovery, not about getting some more of those things you can easily buy when in the core worlds. Salvage skills should support and improve that exciting part of the experience.
The issue with rare find chance, or how it is more commonly termed in rpgs, magic find, is that it inherently promotes and rewards a lot of player activity that is really tedious/gamey, and penalizes a lot of normal play. This is especially true when the opportunities for "rare stuff" are concentrated and finite, like they tend to be in Starsector. Basically, by having a bonus for your chance to find rare, nonrenewable items, then any time you open a station (or a chest) without that bonus, you are wasting some quantity of those special items, since there is no way to try again with your improved odds later.
This then encourages you to always swap to having that bonus active whenever you are about to open something, so as to not waste that chance. In starsector the somewhat high cost of respeccing into and out of skills does help discourage this, but especially for research stations or motherships, which have a pretty high chance of having something special in them, it ends up paying to actively avoid breaking them right away, and instead marking down their location so you can come back when you have the relevant skill equipped and grab a whole bunch of that sort of thing at once. It could end up amounting to paying a couple skill points for say, 5-6 extra colony items, which you would never be able to acquire had you just played naturally.
It also defacto punishes the player for going out and exploring before you have the relevant skill unlocked, even if you do fully intend to unlock and keep it later. This means that if you plan to use that skill long term, you are really heavily pushed to grab it early, so as to not miss out on permanent loot.
Ultimately having the salvage loot boosting skill boost rare find chance isn't the
worst thing of this sort, since star sector does have a meaningful cost in game resources to swap things around, instead of just costing 10 seconds of inventory management before opening every single chest as some games have it, but its still really just not a great modifier to include.
Alternatively, your suggestion of giving you clues as to where good loot can be found is *much* better in my opinion, as it preserves the goal of "Exploration oriented players should get access to more shinies" without actually making permanent changes to what the player will or will not be able to attain in a given playthrough based on whether or not they have the skill active at a particular time. It also provides more clear results, ie "Hey, this neat skill has pointed me to 3 nanoforges! Its so helpful!" rather than "Well, I have 5 nanoforges, and I have 50% bonus find chance, but without that skill I could have gotten 0-5 nanoforges from the exact same actions anyway, so who knows if its actually doing any good".
