I'm not sure where you're reading that because literally every review makes at least some mention to the occasional bugs/jank they've encountered but that it's hardly enough to spoil the game.
I think with people mean is “real bugs.” The bugs the game has are very expected and, by all accounts, not game breaking. Meanwhile AAA studios drop content at launch, charge for everything after you’ve bought it, and have game breaking bugs that force you to restart regularly or sometimes ruin your games. I mean come on, look what happened with. Halo: Infinite and Redfall. It wasn’t goofy animations and such.
No game is truly “bug free.” It’s a catchall term to say “I can play this game from start to finish without any particularly memorable issues.”
There was a bug where save files were not saved anywhere, even on the pc, after too many choices.
It got patched, but steam sync seemed to be the issue.
Not remotely microtransactions at all. The purchase you're referring to is the deluxe edition upgrade, which came free to anyone who played the game during the beta, and costs $10 USD for:
The Soundtrack
An Artbook
An ingame dice skin
Some completely cosmetic items that are outclassed by literally every other thing in the game.
Honestly? To call this a microtransaction is making a pretty big and unjustified claim. This is a bonus to chuck the devs a little extra money for the soundtrack and artbook. The additional stuff is moreso a bonus for purchasing the first two. By comparison, CoD charges $18USD for a gun skin.
For even the buggiest of games, there will always be a subset of day 1 purchasers who buy the game and play it for hours and truly don't experience any bugs out of sheer luck.
I honestly haven't seen anyone write about 'how bug free' the games is.
Most of the praise I see usually revolves around it being a complete game, a big game, nonexistent microtransactions, the characters, the story, the freedom, even how pretty it is. But not that it's bug free.
Because it's definitely not without bugs. Hell, there's a lot of small details that could do with tune-up. And some got addressed in this patch. And I'm looking forward to Patch 2 as it's supposed to improve load-time, which would be very nice indeed.
I run a weird setup... Laptop with Thunderbolt graphics card over usb4.
I get crashes when I have my wavelink microphone plugged in... and at Grymforge from time to time. I've also had a few times where character control freaks out and I have to save/load to get it to work again.
In the AAA game space, yeah, that’s pretty standard fair. I bet you not a single game has launched, well polished or otherwise, that didn’t squash upwards of 1000 bugs in the first few months.