Everything is so slow and grindy because they don't want people to realize how shallow the game really is. Like yeah, it's fun, but it needs to be padded to hell otherwise people would blow through what little content there is and be done with it after only a few hours.

Which is fine, to a degree. But then you have stuff like not being able to travel through portals with raw metal, corpserunning, and invasions (which exist only to force you to stop building and deal with enemies that drop nothing you don't already have lots of).

Valheim's a lot of fun but it also has zero respect for players' time.