I was rly critical of them when they were added, because in general IMO more food is really bad for people learning the game who want to play competitively, which the game needs. But smoked sausages have made the early game super fun for me. Being able to boat around being out of my base all of the time, getting into player interactions, and having it actually be a productive use of time because I'm also hunting is really fun. In previous worlds hunting general hunting was ONLY for combat discoveries, and I wouldn't even touch the corpses.
Also, importantly, it's something nabs can do to feed themselves, or trade the meat to bigbois because hunting isn't very hard. They also give con, so they don't become worthless the second you start botting the power creeped to frick whales, because whales don't have easy con recipes. I think they'll get out scaled pretty quickly once industry happens, but they're great in the early game IMO.
sosig good