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.
You will be kinda disapointed by that then.
There's an option for lowering hunger rates (not sure if you can completely disable it) but you can automate food production very early on, and after you do food becomes a formality pretty much.
Palword's Islands have settlements, camps and towns with npcs, so it's much less empty than rust
This will be a big dissapointment then, bc it is exactly lije you described. Again, the fact that you can use the pals to automate the crafts is a big upside, but you will have to do a LOT of crafting, and some of ot will be manual.
On a final point, the game is very customizable. You can increase/decrease hunger rates, drop rates, exp rates, how much time it takes to craft and build and many other things. If you dislike a certain aspect of the game you can absolutely make it negligible with the configs.