There's ways to make places feel barren, open, unexplored and still be interesting. I've played several games that had sections that were essentially "empty" but still hand designed to be interesting. We don't need 1000 planets, we need good content.
One of the primary reasons people like Bethesda games is that they give players a large world to explore that's jam-packed with interesting things to see a do. If Bethesda abandons that and admits that majority of the content they expect players to interact with is going to be boring, procedurally-generated, then why should people play Starfield?
Bethesda isn't known for deep, complex stories. Their best writing is traditionally their side content with main stories panned. Their combat is pretty basic, but functional. Their RP is pretty sad and NPCs could be a lot better, especially these days. So it seems Bethesda has given away their biggest plus: an interesting world to explore.