I don't like rust.
I don't like building a full building inch by inch. I don't like having to worry about eating too. I can't speak to Palworld, but I don't like rust's empty world, devoid of NPC's short of playing it coop with a lib. I don't like literally every tiny thing having to be crafted, especially with it having its own little crafting subsystems like crafting firewood for fuel for a furnace which crafts materials that are used in another crafted device to craft something else. I also despise crafting and working farms.
One of the few mercies this game offers is Pals to pick up the pace.
I'm going to give it a chance but I'm already going in expecting to be disappointed.
One simple improvement would be being able to just plop down full buildings, but I don't believe that's possible at all.
I still remember basically trying to get my footing in the game, barely having anything, only to be taken down by CoD gear wearing players.
Thankfully Palworld has single player mode so I'm hoping there'll be more to the experience than just 'Rust with Pokemon' (and by that I mean I'm hoping there'll be towns, NPCs and quests).
But yeah, the building system is awful and I'm hoping it'll be moddable and will eventually see full buildings being put in.
Give Valheim a shot if you haven't already. You get to chop down trees and make your viking dream house, but there's also a structured series of goals to pursue which leads to an actual end-game and conclusion (you can still punch trees after that). There's more too it than just accumulating stuff to accumulate stuff - You're accumulating stuff so you can build a boot big enough to kick god in the generatives.
Factorio is another one where you're collecting and building stuff but there's a real goal - Build a space ship to escape the planet you're stuck on.
There's also Conan, which is a much more polished game with a lot more stuff to do and much cooler castles to build than Rust,. It's conan, though, and there's still a bunch of racism baked in to the setting even after they stripped the screaming in your face white supremacy out of most of it.