I for one like the new design. However, here's one suggestion to help the monotony problem:
In the proposed design, when two beacons are placed side-by-side, they each have their own massive 3x3 hole in the ground, with all the metallic shaft lining that this involves. In reality, this would not be ...

It's an IPv4 vs IPv6 thing:

IPv6:
$ wget 'https://www.factorio.com/get-download/latest/headless/linux64'
[...]
Resolving www.factorio.com (www.factorio.com)... 52.87.35.92, 52.22.145.207, 52.86.186.182, ...
Connecting to www.factorio.com (www.factorio.com)|52.87.35.92|:443... connected.
HTTP ...