I... do not agree with you.
Again, the sort of games we're looking at here for comparison are No Man's Sky and Elite: Dangerous.
These are perfectly good games in their own right - and yet in them too you can spend weeks doing basically nothing. E: D has simulated the galaxy: literally billions of systems, tens-hundreds of billions of planets/moons, and outside a core area of a few tens of thousands of systems, most of those systems have basically nothing but proc gen stars and planets. One icy moon is much like another. There's nothing on most of them except the odd mineral cluster you can pick up. And yet thousands of players will explore them anyway, just for the sake of it. After seven years with a few million players, I think about 1% of those systems have ever been visited. And just occasionally, you do stop and realise the view from a particular point is really fucking beautiful, because the proc gen also ends up creating some wonders. You won't see it unless you go out there, and some of us are prepared to put up with the routine to catch those moments.
There's a tiny, weeny, little chunk of the E: D galaxy in the middle of nowhere, about 50-10 light years in diameter, which you can visit and almost every one of those systems shows me as the first player to discover it. Just routine: jumped to the system, fired off the discovery scanner, maybe scanned the planets (if worth the bother), left. No space pirates, no trading, no mining, no alien ruins. It wasn't "exciting" as such, and yet I loved it. That's my little area of the E: D galaxy, that I picked pretty much at random, on a whim decided to make mine. And it felt good.
Those boring planets offer a sense of scope. They mean there's a vastness out there, a place beyond the frontier, places people haven't really gone. You don't really need to use them, but they do actually give something. How utterly weird and claustrophobic would it be, with the whole expanse of the galaxy, that there's only 50 worlds and loads of shit going on on all of them? So yeah, there's 1000 planets and maybe 950 of them are kind of not worth the bother for many players. And yet I suspect their absence would still fundamentally change how the game would feel: it would no longer be a sense of exploration, of humanity expanding across the stars.
NMS and E: D show there's an appetite for this stuff out there. I certainly accept that some people want to play Skyrim: a meticulously crafted place from corner to corner, filled with carefully curated stuff to engage the player (even if plenty of it is still routine kill/fetch quests). If those Skyrim types "don't get it", it's no big deal. Other players do.
