I finally managed to survive past the early game without using "classical zombies". It's true that a bow helps immensely. And unlike melee, it doesn't get any debuffs from having torso encumbrance, so you can carry lots of stuff AND fight. If you make a pair of glove liners you can even get a bonus to your reloading time.
In fact, most of the difficulty for me is about securing clean water. Once you have safe access to a water source and a pot/frying pan, you're pretty much set. Food is easy to secure since animals like squirrels and rabbits are pretty common, and although cooking/cleaning water is sorta annoying at first when you use fire, it's much easier when you get your hands on a hotplate. To be honest, I think that thirst is a bit over the top right now. I don't think that I need to drink half as much water as my character.
Anyway, my town is now clear of all zombies and I even managed to butcher some bionics from shocker zombies. I found Triffids to the east of my shelter and killed a bunch of them before setting their overgrowths on fire, and I'm now getting ready to venture in their lair that I found. Triffids are a really good way to get thread in the form of plant fiber, too. I was a bit disappointed to see how eyebots spawn magically when you set off an alarm, and how they magically make copbots appear too. But it wasn't too annoying to deal with, since they just disappeared after I ran from them. Oh, i even found basic power armor in a wasp-infested house (there were paper walls all over the place, I think that's from the wasps). I'm just hoping to find some dead scientists soon, since I have a couple labs nearby that I'd like to visit.
So yea, it was rough at first, I almost died several times, but now things are getting way easier.