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I suggest to transfer surviving soldiers from the Prologue (training mission) to the main game to get more immersion and player involvement in the game's plot (as done in XCom1 and 2; or Phoenix Point).

My two cents on the frustration with the cleaners: I have been playing in hard difficulty, so it is a timed mission, where you know you gotta move fast, you're going to be fighting more and more of them if you take "too long" in the mission, but in that difficulty with the extra health a human wearing a tuxedo won't die to a rifle shot, let alone a pistol shot, you need at least 2 shots to kill them. You can't run up to their face and use a shotgun because if you don't hit enough shots to kill them you lose a soldier, so it isn't really a smash and grab mission. After trying it several times with different soldier equipment and strategy I managed to get data from all tables one or two turns after reinforcements got there, and I had to retreat safely. I only got out because I placed one assault with good accuracy by a window right next to one of the points where reinforcements spawn, so that soldier was killing 2 guys before they could do anything. You see, I had to exploit the game mechanics to make it more manageable. The whole thing points to cleaners being strong in numbers, they will overwhelm you because they don't care about their losses, still they're as tough as your own soldiers in armor that early in the game. It is a huge spike because nothing is taken away from them to nearly compensate for the reinforcements and the need to retreat safely to beat the mission. P.S. I don't know if I went through those too early, I had barely played a couple of UFO crash sites, no terrorism missions at all, so I thought that dealing with the cleaners was supposed to be the early game.