The real honest answer is it depends. Almost nothing in terms of food is universally better or worse. Calorically, Palm tends to be higher, with some exceptions (due to higher water content in butter). Palm can be made with a ton of different levels of saturation, which is why it's popular in manufacturing (also cost), but how saturated makes a huge difference to how bad it is for you and doesn't need to be labeled. Then there is consideration for natural occurrence of positive vitamins and minerals in some fat sources, or the perceived negative impacts of relatively more processed or less processed fats. Then peoples individual biology's make some choices better than others for them personally.

The most general advice I can give is pay less attention to the source of the fat and more to the nutrition facts call-out for saturated fat (more=bad), from a purely health perspective. From a purely taste perspective, for pies butter and lard are more premium fats and all other sat fats are worse

I am truly interested to know if palm oil is much worse than other saturated fats, so if you have additional source worth reviewing it would be appreciated.

Palm oil has plant sterols, which interfere with human hormonal signaling and lipoprotein function.

Lots of people think this is a benefit of using plant based fats, but some of us don't

The authors do not note any conflicts of interest

The scientists are from Nigeria, one of the largest producers of palm oil, so it could be in their nationalistic interest to dismiss palm oil health concerns to promote their international exports. It's like reading an article about how ICE cars are better for the environment than electric cars written by an American.

They themselves admit in the opening abstract that "Most of the information in mainstream literature is targeted at consumers and food companies with a view to discourage the consumption of palm oil." I'll stick with doing what the mainstream tells me until and unless the mainstream changes.

Some of the links in the paper are more interesting though because they include actual randomized experiments, like the one where people were randomly assigned to switch to palm olein oil or olive oil for cooking, and both were about as good for their cholesterol levels. Palm olein is the liquid fraction of fractionated palm oil, high in oleic acid. I am actually open to the idea that palm olein could be better than some of the other cooking oils like soybean oil or corn oil, which I also avoid at all cost, or lard. However whether palm olein is a better substitute for soybean oil is a separate question from whether the solid palm oil is a better substitute for butter, which the Nigerian paper just lumps all in the same category. It's the highly-saturated fatty acids in the solid fraction, the same ones that make palm oil butter-like, that are the problem for my pie search.