I personally enjoy the new mechanics a lot. FINALLY food is not hot anymore in the jackets forever. No more heat cheating 🙂 God I hated that so much.. Plus the heat buffer works great. Warm up at a fireplace, then go out into the rainy night again and keep working for an hour, repeat. Great! Firewood could just be made stackable tbh. You can carry 6 of them inside a fireplace thats only 5x5 but you cant stack em alone.
About the spawning however, especially mushrooms and the like.. Ye, you need to give that stuff some time to spawn too. If I spend some time in an area, the forests around start to spawn a lot of shrooms. But your character also blocks spawns if it is too close. Apparently its technically impossible to have loot just spawn on its own - it needs a player in range to initiate it. It's always been like that. The buildings/objects are not active/accesible by script otherwise or something like that... And if the player just runs into a town - he will block the zones before he actually triggers a new spawn.
If you are desperate for loot and you cant make it to another town due to hunger/thirst, you can wait 200-300m outside town for a while. It will pop some new spawns on empty loot spots after about 5min. It's kinda cheesy.. but it's how it works. I just try and do it "naturally". Take a turn through the forest first, observe the town a little before I go in.. etc. And dont "switch" a clothing item right from the ground when you find it. That way you block the loot spawn with your athletic shoes or your tshirt for the rest of time. 😉