I had the opposite experience running around though, it felt very satisfying to just go "what's that over there" and run into totally skippable content like dragons, simple korok seed puzles, tracking down shooting stars landing in enemy territory, finding and riding the lord of the mountain, watching enemy bokoblins try to hunt a wild boar, solving the puzzle of how to get a shrine to appear, snowboarding, landing on a far away island and taking down the slumbering cyclops that rules it, goron golfing with giant rocks, etc etc. It's like a big yard where you can go anywhere and there is something delightful tucked in everywhere.

I think the sparsity of people is deliberate, it's post apocalyptic where most travelers you encounter are probably assassins from an enemy cult.

In general I felt like it was the result of a very different game approach than something like cyberpunk, where they added small things to the game one by one while making sure they meshed and were polished to a mirror finish.