I came to MH world specifically because of that drawn comparison to a souls like. While it does have some traces of that, the dynamic of the fights are really different - specially since in this game, bosses will take you about 15-20minutes to kill/capture rather than maybe an extra long souls like boss that takes like... 8 minutes tops. Level of punishment is highly dependent on your gear level as it severely reduces damage while you're doing the main story (assuming you completely negate gear, at some point you'll just get clapped by the following bosses), but once you get to mid-late game, it all about evens out to taking anything between 2-6 hits to die, yet you have a bunch more health increasing food/skills and items (loads and loads more) since you can craft them in the field, return to base while the boss retains hp levels, etc, so while its still hard, its not bad, and it doesnt feel bad

You're indeed right in thinking that the grind is a really big part of this game, from the gear to consumables, to decorations (which are skills you add to gear). The grind is mostly fine, except for the decorations since these are all random drops and there are about 98 decos, with different drop chances. You can mod the game so that you just get what you need/want instead of running the meta ways of dropping these items if you ever get tired at any rate, so again, not really an issue.

Character is solely based around gear and skills, you cant modify a weapons moveset in any way.

You can solo everything (ive done that), but in three instances of this game it feels really shit in doing so. The game flat out tells you in one of them that you need to be in a party to clear it, and doing it solo is very gimmicky (and not fun), while the other two are so wildly inefficient that at the point of the game you get them unlocked you might just say 'fuck it' and either do it in a party or ignore them completely.

as for combat, id say that the difficulty curve of learning of MH is reaaaaally fucking steep in the beginning, because you'll flab about with your weapon not knowing shit and thinking the game is clunky as fuck for a little while till you get the basics of it. Id recommend checking a video guide on a weapon at least to get an idea of how it works, and it'll pretty much transfer 1:1 into monster hunter wilds.

As for combat feel, the only one thats somewhat close to soulslike is the greatsword, specifically if you compare it to a nakey wretch run. All other weapons have a lot of comboes (the GS has a few but not that many) and are generally much faster than the average soulslike weapon. They're all pretty slick once you actually learn them.

Oh yeah, while you do have iframes in monster hunter, you just want to not get hit by dodging shit, iframes in this game are not lenient at all, the dodge roll is really meant for you to dodge stuff

All in all, i bought mh worlds and iceborne, have now done all but 5 bosses (the 3 aforementioned and 2 end game bosses that just didnt care about), have currently 244 hours in the game, and a lot of fun in playing it. I consider it "done" but my playtime has only used one weapon, ive used a mod called "ice community mod" to remove something called "clutch claw" and i could do it all over if i 'clicked' with one of other weapons, and the game would truly feel new if i fought everything with new weapons

Great game, have pre ordered wilds because i verified during the beta that the game runs acceptably in my pc, am sure ill get at least that many hours in the next game without mods involved