Open-world is pointless only from a gameplay design perspective, not so pointless from the financial one. Sales numbers are the best proof of it.
The initial idea behind
Daggerfall, as expressed by its lead designer, was that the computer would be your DM and shuffle the furniture of the world around behind the scenes, on the fly, according to your choices.
The game fell far short of that ofc, and open world games since then have tended to rely on a bunch of kludgy tropes because of the difficulty of implementing such an idea; but the idea, as a
gameplay design idea, at least in terms of aspiration, is sound. It's probably just going to take a few more iterations in terms of computer horsepower and AI before it can be fully implemented.
Once graphics are "done" (which I think we're fairly close to, in the large, since the incremental improvements there are getting tinier and tinier, and once RT is solid we'll be pretty much there), then I think developers will probably focus again on implementing that idea - much better AI, and a game that's actually quasi-intelligent, and interacts with the player more.
And it's going to be glorious
It's what a lot of people have always wanted from games, a virtual world that's a mirror. The ultimate in narcissism