That's the exact reaction I had as somebody who found Ark pretty boring and was not impressed by the footage I saw of the game, but I am really liking the game so far. I can't really point at any one reason for it, but this game just does it right. Like, take food for example. In most survival games, food is totally pointless. Kill one animal and you are set for a few days, spend 10 minutes hunting and you never have to worry about food again. In Valheim, your default health when unfed is around 30 and your stamina bar is a pitiful 4 notches wide. Eat a berry, your max health is now around 40 but slowly dropping and your stamina bar has 5 notches. Eat cooked meat alongside the berry, you now have a respectable 65 health and 7 notches. Throw in a mushroom and now you are sitting pretty with solid health and stamina. You are now full and cannot eat any more varieties of food until you get hungry again and your max health is dropping back down. You can only eat one of each type of food at a time, so you need to go out and get a variety of food to keep your health and stamina high enough to fight enemies and get shit done. As you progress through the game you get access to better food which gives you incredibly high maximum health and stamina (like, 150ish) but that means keeping a steady supply of that food as it will still run out and you can't keep yourself topped up with just easy to find food like berries.

This one relatively simple feature is enough to make food actually relevant and worth putting effort into, which is really rare in survival games. Instead of leveling up and increasing max HP, you NEED to keep up a steady supply of a variety of high quality foods in order to be powerful enough to defeat later enemies and not get one shotted. Playing in a group of 5, having somebody spending most of their time collecting food is actually worthwhile.