Other than certain hardcore packs that just have 'grind x resource' as a limiter to progression before you are permitted access to certain mods, no I don't believe this is a thing.
Unfortunately, it would be a very difficult to implement thing. Every single research would basically be its own quest, using something like HQM, and tiered restrictions like Modern Skyblock 3, flat out preventing you from working with certain items or components until you unlock the research.
It could be made to work, I suppose, but it would be excessively complicated and require a very convoluted quest 'tech' tree. Unless someone wants to develop a new type of research mod. Maybe that mod that Continuum uses to create timesinks can be used to do the research thing? I dunno yet. It might be possible, but seems annoying. And really, the biggest thing about the science in Factorio is that the amount of resources you need keep climbing as you keep progressing, so it is always a relevant portion of your production. In effect, a production tax to progress. And it does this with tiered recipes with each next tier requiring the previous tier of a component.
Thinking further on it... I'm actually seeing how it might be done. It'll be more in the style of Bobs/Angel's resource progression, where you have amalgamated ores that need to be separated out, which is already taken care of in-house with Thermal's chance of producing, for example, nickel ore out of iron ore. So at the beginning, you would start off with copper and iron ore veins exposed, which you then have to put machines on to harvest. These will have to be 'low tech' machines, using cobble and wood as the primary components, maybe flint as well, and be run by burning things. Which isn't out of the question. You'd need fairly large veins of ores, and the mechanic would probably be something like a 5% chance of destroying the ore the furthest down in the vein in it's 2x2 area for every ore it produces to reflect just how long you can run a miner on a given patch of ore and how much ore it gives you. Make sure to replace the ore with something like cobble so you don't get a ton of honey traps.
Thermal Expansion doesn't really work very well for this, so let's use Immersive Engineering as our basis. You'll need to start off by building your infrastructure. You're going to need to change some of the recipes if you don't want the Nether to be appearing, or to give some way of getting blaze powder for the blast furnace, because to get the secondary ores, you'll need a Grinder, which is a pretty sizable and expensive multiblock. The way IE handles power also dovetails very nicely with Factorio's, and you can use IE's belts in a similar manner as well. Use a block... maybe something similar to the old RP2's Translocators or Filters to act as the Inserters.
For the science labs, you'll need to make a custom mod. Very similar in nature to a questing mod, this will unlock access to various things as you progress, and will require the insertion of a given number of 'science packs' of the correct type, adding in new recipes for these science packs, and the science labs themselves act much like the old quest block from AgSkies 2, in that they accept and record how many of the items they have received, and when you hit the research you have indicated, you get the quest complete, and you unlock the new research, and have to select a new research.
It should be possible, but it would also probably be extremely non-trivial to do.
