Really npc's are stupid in skyrim, gta, cyberpunk whatever. And it doesn't matter. When you look at Watch Dogs, its getting very repettetive anyway; You look at a few and discover that you actually don't care about it anyway.
I play cyberpunk right now for the story they build and they build, so far, a very good story.
They can keep the npcs as they are honestly; Finetune perhaps but meh
PS. I'm also enjoying the game a lot, but soft locks and brokenness is starting to take it's toll.
In earlier GTAs like San Andreas there is an explicit difference between "traffic in the distance" and "traffic close by" - the former will be removed if out of sight, doesn't have full-fidelity 3D models, apparently doesn't have physics applied to them, ... Once they get close enough, they get more complete and sticky. (GTA V quite possibly does the same, I just know less about the details there and its a lot less obvious)
Regarding your second point, I'm not sure if you've seen how it's handled in CP? Basically all roads in the distance have a string of car/headlight sprites (yes, 2D) moving on them. Makes the world look amazingly populated and alive.
However the density of the sprite cars is much higher than the actual cars (depending on your settings). So when driving on a long road you always seem to be chasing a large group of cars that you can never reach. There seems to be no connection between actual cars spawning in and the sprite based crowd illusion.
And if you use a scope with good zoom to observe the sprite cars, it looks very funny. Basically you have very obvious Doom faux-3D sprites in an otherwise stunning environment.
That said, why do we have to remain purely positive for an expensive AAA game that promised so much and sold at a high price tag? Why should they be excused?