Virtually every open world game has the same basic loop: collect, craft/buy/sell, build.
After that, it's just a question of how you motivate players to go through the loop: quests (Elder Scrolls), randomly generated threats (Minecraft, Terraria), multiplayer PC threats (WoW, EVE), etc.
Sounds like this author feels NMS fails to justify itself in this way.
Maybe that's just me, but Minecraft is totally not about randomly generated threats. Sure, you have a certain set of milestones related to combat (e.g. loot a nether fortress, defeat the Ender dragon), but 99% of what motivates me about Minecraft is building stuff.
Of course, AFAIK, NMS only added "building stuff" (e.g. bases) to the list of things you could do after the initial release.
That is a massive loop though, huge, world size, not confined to a specific path. I choose my path through the world.
> After that, it's just a question of how you motivate players to go through the loop
Open World is about ... openness. The player gets to decide, specific motivation not required; the journey is the motivation.
But you still need gameplay mechanics to support the user's activities.
If the user is motivated by quests, you need good quests.
If the user is motivated by conflict, then you need good fighting mechanics, etc.
If the user is motivated by building/construction, you need strong mechanics to support that.
Unfortunately, I suspect you'll find very few user's who are motivated over the long term by just wandering around seeing cool stuff.
I think of journey as see, do, explore. Perhaps there's a better word than journey I could use. I'm not defending NMS, I'm defending Open World.
Heck, if you're gonna argue this way, I'm surprised you didn't pick Super Mario Bros. After all, Mario Bros. is just wandering around and seeing cool stuff. You just to have to jump over things every now and then...