This is more a reflection of the state of online gaming discourse and youtube rambling clickbait these days. People believe what the culture tells them cool people believe, and perpetuate it to others. No Man's Sky didn't have multiplayer at launch. Now it does. That's pretty much the only indisputable improvement to the game. They've certainly managed to improve the NARRATIVE about the game, though.

EDIT: I also want to call out one particularly user-hostile thing they have done: pump up the visual quality and complexity so high that the game performs very poorly on the console generation on which it was released: the PS4/Xbox One generation. This is true even on performance mode. So if you bought the game at release, you will now suffer degraded performance if you are still using your original hardware. You don't hear too much about this because when it's mentioned the person usually gets console-shamed, e.g. "get with the times, time to upgrade you cheapskate!" It's not only low framerates and ambient pop-in; it's also extremely bad pop-in of hazardous plants and structures. And you often can't land your ship on the ground until the terrain has fully generated. This can take a minute or two sometimes. Or you could try to go harvest from one of your resource collectors and have to wait something like 10 seconds for it to finally appear in front of you. And once it did, the chances of it bugging out and having no resources inside of it are way too high.