I gave up on Project Hail Mary for now (as I said, I generally don’t like sci-fi and when aliens appeared, I gave up altogether), and went back to fantasy. Finally got to readingThe Grace of Kings by Ken Liu. Am about a quarter in, and can’t believe it took me so long to recognize that the story is based on Liu Bang and XiangYu!
Re: Project Hail Mary, if you’d be willing to give it a second chance, I highly recommend switching to the audiobook version. The voice acting is just superb.