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Notes -
Dealing with NPCs doing things in any not-fake way is surprisingly rough, especially if you have any serious amount of building or terrain movement going on -- I dunno whether it's technically impressive, but getting it to behave non-crazy ways without chugging down a server takes more effort than you might expect.
I did some unrelated small work (json and ui futzing) on a Minecraft mod called Minecolonies a few years ago, which tried to have 4 to 250 npcs doing pretty basic activities in a well-defined range, and the developers who were running the main pathfinding code had to pull some amazing tricks and awkward compromises to have it work, and it was still extremely scary just trying to help diagnose or replicate failure modes. Just the question of 'find trees in X blocks from X position had a million different ways to break.
Ark/Palworld is a slightly easier version of the problem since there's fewer nav updates (building, not block), it's a sparser field to work with, and you can more easily register just the relevant ones, but it's still something where I've got a huge amount of patience for people who try it and get a slightly-buggy result.
(Though, uh, too buggy can be a problem: Ark's solution still occasionally resulted in disappearing critters ten years in, bad enough that one of the most popular mods was a hitching post, and that was only Terraria-level wandering.)
I think there are a lot of defenses, and far more possibility: Palworld is, after all, just recently into early access, and some few games have done amazing things with the model, and just by allowing private servers and a modding api they've done a lot better than some of the more obnoxious Steam shovelware (and just by releasing something playable, they're better than the typical kickstarter scam). I'll probably try the game eventually once my free time has been consumed less by work and stem outreach stuff.
But I think there's something more than Arjin's proposed causes, than loser-hate or Nintendo-loyalty (or immune reaction to AIgen proponents).
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