You can always restart lol. I have bad habit of restarting worlds frequently. I haven't even played the story quests yet and I probably have well over 200 hours total play time across various worlds. Most of the time its just me and a friend playing multiplayer, we get to winter, get stacked on food and iron, then restart and try different ways to play/change up the world settings or mods.
Currently we are doing a run where we start both start on opposite sides of the world and plan on meeting up in the middle of the map once we get enough flax for boats (its a semi-island world 50% landcover, 400% landcover scale, 25k equator distance, almost everything is connected by ocean). This way we can collect tons of different building blocks/recourses from each climate and horde them in a central island base.
The biggest benefits of restarting is playing through different world gen settings to find what you prefer. You also begin to master the early game progression which frees up a lot of time and makes things a lot less stressful early on .
At this point Building and chiseling is half the game for me since progressing through the metals can be rushed very quickly if I'm motivated. I'm just addicted to the aesthetics and the fine details of building, as well as the hours of grinding to obtain just a basic homestead. I cant wait for those colored vessels/pots in the next update lol