In fact for me - meadow & forest are a big food cost for nothing. They have no immediate value since you can build directly producing tiles on burned lands like farms. However in potential harder maps where you start with burned tiles already healing the land first might be necessary before placing lumber camps.
If you’re too slow to extinguish fires, then restoring land can be useful for placing houses, pastures, or lumber camps.
Otherwise, there are usually enough wood-producing tiles on each map, making meadows and forests unnecessary in most cases.
The conclusion is that the game rythm and only 2 cards choices make the direct resource production way more usefull than land restoration. Even if you replace your burned lumberjack into a farm.