This is one of my biggest gripes with the game. You literally have self driving cars built into the lore (and the story - Delamain) AND flying cars (Trauma Team, police officers), why the hell does anyone care about owning a car or driving it? We have cybernetic eyes and our cars drive/fly themselves and we still need to put up LED traffic lights?
Sure it makes sure in the outskirts to pick up a 4x4 offroader and do some cool desert driving for side missions. But in Night City? It should be modeled after pedestrians, and it is in some cases, but the road layout clearly looks like it was modeled for a city in 2012 and not 2077.
Don't get me wrong, I'm loving the story (watching let's plays no less, I don't have the specs to run the game myself). I think it's a great game despite the bugs and performance issues that will unfortunately haunt CDPR for a great deal of time. But some of the plot holes are just so deep, it hurts to think about because of how much better the story would be.
For example, I know the breaching minigame where you have to click through the matrix to complete the sequence of hex codes is unrealistic and not how you would hack a real computer. Obviously, I'm not going to gripe about that, it's a minigame inside of a video game and it's meant for entertainment, not realism. But, come on, you introduce us to cybernetic eye implants and we still have to use a 27" monitor to check our email? Why would you ever use a monitor again?
Would Vampire the Masquerade be a better game if you could just drive between setpieces in a fully rendered city instead of having a loading screen? Probably, but it would also increase the development workload by an order of magnitude for what would effectively be a gimmick that wouldn't really add a lot to the game.
And even outside of RPGs, there are countless adventure and FPS games without vehicles. Doom doesn't have cars, neither does Tomb Raider, Devil May Cry or Resident Evil.
Of course if you're thinking of something like "GTA V, but you can't drive cars" then obviously that seems very tedious, but if you build the game with this constraint in mind it shouldn't be much of an issue. Then you can focus on other aspects of the game.
Cyberpunk is clearly not at its best when you're in a vehicle, and there's no telling what else they could've implemented and finished if they had cut it entirely and focused on other aspects of the game instead.
The reason why it's tedious is because the map is built around cars. You can't go very far without encountering a road. This makes it fairly hostile to be a pedestrian since you're relegated to walking on sidewalks (or in front of traffic if you're daring).
A city built around pedestrians could have a much different environment, like open green spaces, cobblestone paths, proactive NPCs engaging in little dialogues with shopkeepers, people trying to sell you stuff on the streets, etc. A real "night out on the city" vibe that I don't think any city-style game has tried going for yet.
edit To rephrase, I don't even think it's about the endings at all. Most of the choices in the game do not actual change the trajectory of your character. Most of the decisions put you on the same track. Kill steve, don't kill steve, even if it seems like it mattered to some part of the story, it actually did not.
Hell, even The Witcher 3 did this incredibly well. Spoiler incoming for those who haven't played it yet.
"The Bloody Baron" quest not only has three endings, IIRC, but one of your choices can lead to entire village dying. And I'm pretty sure there's a few other variables that can end up having some effect at later points in the story.
Granted, it's probably the most-cited example of great Witcher 3 quests, second perhaps only to the romancing options (again, 3 possible outcomes), but I've already come across a few more main and sub-quests where reloading and trying a different option was meaningful.
As part of the journey, they might not affect the ending, but in an RPG style game with quests, it's just as much about the journey.
In this game the lack of choices mattering is apparent from the beginning. Most gamers may not care but for a certain type of gamer, this is a game ruiner.
For example with ME3 again, I had fun the entire way through the game, assuming my prior games' choices mattered. And there actually were different dialogue options, references to past choices, etc.
The ending was awful, and I will never replay that game ever. But if my choices didn't matter even while playing, before the ending... well that's just an awful game to a person like me. I would never play a minute of a story-based, choice-based game where I know the choices don't matter.
What's the point of the map, if all you're concerned about is which ending you get? If there are 40 choices with an average of 3 options each, it's still obvious before you buy or even hear anything about the game that it won't have 12,157,665,459,056,928,801 endings.
You can definitely have N number of choices contribute to 2 or more endings and still have every choice matter.
You can have 100 choices with 3 options, and have all of the make an impact on the ending and still only have 2-3 endings. Or any number of endings between 2 and n (in your case the 12*10^m.
Have each choice do a +1, 0, or -1 to some internal metrics.
You could call this a good or evil system, but it could be a ton of different things. They could be doing +1,0,-1 to corpo, streetkid, and nomad rankings.
Some choices might do +1 to streetkid and nomad, and 0 to corpo, you could have any number of combinations. Or you could have 1 choice do +10 to corpo.
Then at the end, whichever had the highest score would be your ending. Or you could do if highest was 10-30 points, you'd get 1 ending, but if your highest was 40+ youd get super ending. Like if you were mostly corpo, but still a bit others, maybe you become middle management in final cinematic at corpo X, but if you were like ALL IN on corpo choices, maybe you'd become new president of some corpo Y.
That way every choice matters, and you can still have a few different endings. And the 'vanilla basic ending' being where you are choices were mostly neutral, or what they guessed majority of playerbase would choose.
But what OP was saying, is that 98% of questions have 0 impact on anything. Which makes them not impactful and not matter at all, and that often is boring.
Cut the content in third and make it 3x deeper and it would have been a great game (bugs and all). Well perhaps not on last generation consoles, I have not tried it there.
OP says "Some players expected this to be cyberpunk-themed RDR2/GTA5". I think some higher ups at CDPR wanted for it to be that at the start, and they only corrected course very late into development when they realized that they'd never meet the deadline.
If they had cut off the driving completely for instance, and instead focusing on having things like taxis and public transportation, you'd get a much more immersive RPG setting and you wouldn't have the immersion breaking, performance tanking, AI-stupidity-demonstrating driving and car chase sequences.
Then once the game is successful you can extend and improve it with expansions and sequels, building on top of a solid base.
Instead they managed to miss the deadline twice in a row despite making their devs crunch and despite all that they released a completely broken, unfinished game.