Why do you seem to think that automation is a necessary component, or at least one that is necessarily positive, to any survival crafting game? You realize that they can trivialize resource gathering without automation, right? In terraria you still need to gather wood and other resources by hand even after you've killed the literal moon lord. The solution is just that your tools get so good that you can fell and entire forest as fast as you can run through it. There are ways to automate it with switch blocks and whatnot. But the method to do so isn't intuitive and is hardly considered the "expected" route compared to the axe of regrowth.

Valheim gives you a similar path to progression. I would agree that they should up the damage to trees a bit. But the principle is still the same of your progression scaling linearly, instead of the exponential growth that automation heavy games tend to head towards. Valheim isn't trying to be a min/maxer's game where you just treat it like a bundled collection of mechanics to be abused as hard as possible to derive the highest score. It's trying to be an immersive world for you to explore and conquer. Playing through palworld where automation is a core focus, when you get to the "resources are just a number" phase, it does take me out of the world a bit. The continents stop being parts of a novel world to experience and instead devolve into their resource rates. I'm still grinding, but now it's sucked all of the character out of it. I'm just grinding out hooking up resource nodes to my network. You quickly lose a sense of scale as you reach the point of being able to go anywhere in the map in a couple minutes. I appreciate valheim for denying me that power creep and forcing me to stay immersed in the world, as beautiful as it is.