The difference between cyberpunk 2077 and starfield is that cyberpunk screwed up the technical side of things at launch, but had a rich story with great characters and an immersive world full of environmental story telling even in very off the beaten track locations. CDPR has been able to improve the performance to match the quality of the rest of things

Subjectively speaking, Starfield in contrast had a decent technical launch but the world feels empty, the story is “meh” at best, the companions are one note boyscouts and the exploration gets stale very quickly. I don’t see Bethesda completely overhauling the game’s systems to change those things.

As an example, in CP2077 I was in a random section of Chinatown far away from any quest or location marker and decided to explore. I found my way to some enclosed pipe tunnel which lead to a huge pit with a platforming puzzle leading to a junk pile with a corpse which had a note on it and an exotic weapon. No reason to ever go that way, but there was something interesting to find.

In contrast, beyond my example of the frozen labs in my comment above, in 90 hours playing Starfield I never once found something of value in a cave. That is certainly not something that encourages exploration.