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.
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.