For practical purposes yes - we can work with cobblestone and upgrade later, absolutely, it's just that not having those other things available to us earlier on is just not as 'fun' for people who don't really have an interest in the going out and looting part of things. *Plus* - again we play as a larger crowd, so we have to essentially scale up our defenses and progress in order to be able to keep our heads above water towards the middle and late game when we're wanting to start pushing game stage 300.
If it is indeed 'officially' just 1 to 8 players then I must say it's worked just fine for bigger communities to build servers and player experiences that are beyond a small handful of people surviving in a base by themselves. There's a huge overlap in this game's playerbase with other titles like Project Zomboid, or even Ark: Survival Evolved and Minecraft, and so forth and all of those definitely support more than just 8 players - was working pretty good for those purposes, even if it's on accident, and it fit 7 Days in a 'neighborhood' of games, and this just feels like they're intentionally taking this into the 'we make this more for streamers' neighborhood. A player experience of 8 or less players just sounds lonely as hell to me.
Also, we've used mods in the past before - we just hate how it always introduces even more bugs than were already there to begin with. It's a matter of mitigating problems rather than spending the bit of spare time our admin team has by constantly troubleshooting with other players.
Plus, I'll humbly say again: I liked the vanilla base game with default settings, as it was. It worked out great for a big chunk of my life that we'd almost ritualistically hop in every time an update came out and try the new stuff.
