They made a huge universe and then filled it all with copies of a very small subset of items. It feels like Fallout/Skyrim/etc had a lot more unique content on launch even though the 'world' of starfield is technically a lot larger and that makes it feel even emptier.
It seems like instead of making 1000 procedurally generated planets, they should have made maybe 10 handcrafted planets you could traverse and find things tucked away to do.