That's true for the unmodded game. Exploration becomes rewarding once you install mods such as reduced loot (counter-intuitively), and mods that make combat more lethal.
I could see drastic loot reduction helping, but not fixing the problem altogether because that loot is still randomly spawned off a generic leveled list. So is Skyrim's, but the main drive to explore there is to find
quests, not loot, and that's inapplicable to Cyberpunk. The only "RPG" that I played where random loot worked as an incentive was Diablo 2, but that system was a thinly-disguised slot machine that
did occasionally cough up some uberitems waaay ahead of your power curve.