Exploration and time limits are antithetical: exploration works best when you can freely waste your time "exploring" the world which is very hard to do when the game is telling you to hurry up and you don't know the real level of urgency.
How so? The game world is persistent (apart from various environmental hazards / power/ transportation issues), you can explore to your hearts content within the time limits, going to another zone / changing exploratory strategies if it expired. Some people are just afraid of timers regardless of what they do and how they work, that's it, no rational explanation needed. Also, there's difference between goals-based exploration and mindless TES-like hiking (it'd be actually great if there were some sort of slow timer in the original game that was tied, for example, to O2 generators or power plants of the station, but it'd be even less palatable for people who like turtle-paced 'explorashun'). Just imagine you could just slowly search for the key card to the janitor room, it'd kill all the suspense and tension.
Most people play games to have fun and escapism not to be subjected to obscure timer mechanics.
This is the way it is. People have always complained about fake urgency either if it was in Fallout, Dragon Age or Mooncrash.
Again: No one is talking about "obscure" or "hidden" timers, they're talking about explicit and obvious ones. Fallout and Mooncrash fundamentally differ in their approach to timers because:
A) One features a hidden timer (Fallout) and the other one doesn't (Mooncrash).
and
B) The expiration of one's timer (Fallout's) leads to a permanent Game Over and the other's (Mooncrash's) doesn't.
Honestly it seems like you have not played Mooncrash based on your arguments here.
A) Fallout timer is well hidden.
B) I did not play Mooncrash because I don't like time constraints in a single player game but I did not complain or whine about it.
C) You seem completely oblivious to the link between timers and fake urgency.
https://googlethatforyou.com?q=false urgency
...That’s not the only (or arguably even the main) timer in Fallout, and the others are hidden or misleading.
On the one hand I want to give you props for being man enough to admit you haven’t played Mooncrash, but you’re also just admitting that you have no context for the argument you’re participating in. Mooncrash’s timer is not reliant on or supportive of false urgency because it is pretty explicitly used as a means to facilitate and give meaning to the game’s progression mechanics, and unlike Fallout or Freddy Pharkas or whatever game with a timer traumatized you, it will never trap you in a fail state.
It’s not trying for urgency, false or real, it’s simply trying to create a systemic economy of choice (and to be perfectly frank it largely fails at that).