Yes that was the loudest portion of the complaints for sure.
Marketing also hit the create overhype button one too many times. Maybe given the topic, genre and time of release it would have create overhype anyway, but its a moot point at this point.
Open world games can be played in a lot of different ways depending on your playestile you might care or not care about it’s limitations. So just because feature X is missing doesn’t mean it would matter to everyone or it’s automatically a bad game.
In those Reddit threads almost everyone seemed like they had second hand information or it was just a meme that was constantly repeated.
It’s a design decision, in the sense a bit like elite dangerous where the planet generation is realistic, as far as we know, even at the expense of being boring.
I prefer the rock paper shotgun approach of not having any review scores whatsoever. I’d rather read why something is good or not than the other way around.
So it’s a game with the biggest open city in any game bar none and so on. But that’s not enough, reason is what you are hoping is likely impossible not at the scale of night city. Even if AI was ok it would be not enough NPC models not enough buildings to explore and so on. But all these things don’t contribute anything to this kind of game.