Really? I play football life 24 with the F4L realism gameplay mod and ive had a blast. You should try it out 100%. Theres a teleportation glitch that happens soemtimes but otherwise its a really good mod and a really good patch in general. Teams actually look to build up instead of hoofing it up the pitch and i noticed thats the difference from vanilla pes gameplay. Also noticed how specific teams will press more and be more aggressive like liverpool, city, etc. Although one thing that annoys me in pes 21 is that there is defo some sort of rigging/scripting in some games, especially FA cup. Otherwise for me, football life has been a really enjoyable experience and it has really fixed pes gameplay wise. Oh yeah, also its not just the gameplay mod. I use a football life option file which changes the tactics of ALL Teams so it fits their actual real life tactics.
Realistic gameplay in EAFC 24 really help the game feel more realistic, but still a lot of sliding and players still run too fast, IMHO, although there's still a bit more of pace change thanks to the analogic sprint.
I would put it like this, PES is overall better in max speed that players can get, and animations and animation blending is better done imo, but EA FC has better pace change and player positioning, where PES is much more box to box gameplay and you're way more forced to play forward, even if max speed of players and ball is better, all of this speaking, of course, about realistic mods.
EA FC has much more values to change, but that also means much more values that you don't know what they do, if anything, so it takes more time to get something decent. Way more difficult to change, since the base is also much more messed up so... Potentially better, but on the short term, way more difficult to get results. Just a matter of balance and preferences.
Had I time, I would be trying to mod (and I don't mean install mods but create them) both games, but due to my limited ammount of time, since I work at the moment 6 days a week, and I am back in my town and have social life to attend (and other games to play) I prefer to go with PES, since is less time consuming to get results. When I was living out of my country and had more free time (past year) I used to try tood FIFA 23, and actually was starting to get good results. But the mod corrupted and then the modding tools started to fail for EAFC 24, and when they started working again, porting all from a FIFA 23 corrupted file to EA FC 24 was almost impossible and I had to start again from scratch, so I decided to come back again to PES, who's community had done an amazing job unlocking new animations and improving gameplay in general.
I encourage, though, to try mods for both games, and those you can get into creating mods, and have enough free time, create mods for both, if you can. On the long term, EA FC will probably be better, but in the meantime, is good to have a good alternative.