One of my favorite mods for Minecraft is a mod called 'Lingering Loot' and I think it would be an awesome fit as a vanilla feature for Vintage Story for realism and immersion reasons. Link to Lingering Loot on CurseForge
Sometimes you just don't end up picking up every block or item while digging, mining, or chopping trees down, because you didn't see it on the ground, so you leave and miss it, or the object ended up in an awkward spot away from your position in-game and becomes too much a hassle to go and retrieve it. Well, with 'Lingering Loot', those dropped objects, even as combined stacks, would place themselves in the empty 'air' or water block spaces they find themselves in after they timeout. Multiple dropped objects sharing the same empty block space would simply clip through and move to the nearest empty block space when the first object timeout happens, explosively if they share the same timeout. You can observe what I mean when for example, when you place a dirt block in a spot where a dropped dirt block happens to be, the in-game physics makes the dropped dirt block just clip and squeeze over to an available empty space.
With 'Lingering Loot', dropped or abandoned blocks and ground-storage items would never disappear, even stuff dropped after death, with maybe exceptions to items dropped in lava-magma. Also maybe make dropped blocks in lava-magma clip to an empty space to preserve the lava-magma. I don't know the behavior of lava-magma in Vintage Story, so just I'm spitballing here. Chopping down trees could drop their seeds and timeout results in planted saplings to replace the fallen tree. Want a quick dirt mound or dirt hill? Just toss stacks of dirt and wait. Want to fill-in that deep, scary hole? Just toss stacks of dirt and wait. I haven't played on any public Vintage Story server, so I don't know what that's like, but I do remember some Minecraft servers having their worlds absolutely stripped of dirt blocks and other stuff with 2b2t's spawn area being a good example. Perhaps a feature like 'Lingering Loot' would help mitigate that.
Video Demo of Lingering Loot