Zombra Hollow Knight actually does this with their Stag Stations/Tram and I'd agree that it definitely adds to the quality of fast travel in a game. That being said I don't think it's a must have. There are some games where an animation would just be weird/unfitting, or perhaps I say that because I can't picture what a good animation would be for said games.
There isn't anything wrong with travel hub based fast travel. You get to cut out the monotony of moving back and forth between cities while still preserving immersion and the pleasure of exploration. Underrail did a great job with its fast travel system to list a RPG, and they even took their fast travel a step further in the expansion and added a lot more fast travel locations. They did this while somehow managing to preserve the size of the game world, the remoteness of some locations, and keep everything setting consistent. As long as your games exploration isn't complete dogshit and has interesting locations outside of the cities/travel hub locations, you will be completely fine.
Every proper Open World game will be scaled down relative to the environment it simulates, in order to allow the player-character to directly traverse the game world in a reasonable amount of time. This avoids the self-defeating Open World design of Daggerfall, in which the player is reliant on a fast travel system to move between settlements and dungeons, without actually traversing the game world because the time required is prohibitive. A good Open World can still deliver the impression of being much larger than it actually is, even if not to the degree of the geographic area it emulates, as was the case for Morrowind.
I agree with the idea that a proper open world game should be scaled down relative to the environment it's simulating, but the fact that you cite Morrowind as an example of a game that does this is hilarious. we can add this to the list of reasons why hubs based RPGs and/or zone tranisition based RPGs are generally superior to open world RPGs. Open world games that don't give a good sense of scale is a perfect way to kill immersion. One of the few RPGs that manages to have an open world that actually feels properly massive is Kenshi.
As shown here, Kenshi has one of the largest game worlds of any game, much less RPGs, but it not once feels like it's overly large/excessive. The fact that it ranks so highly on this list despite being perfect in size is indicative of how few open world RPGs games, much less RPGs, there are that actually manage to create game worlds which do a good job of realistically scaling down the environments they are simulating.
This is why open world settings should take place on a smaller scale, such as a tiny island, or small portion of land, instead of the shit we usually have. I think the idea of traveling to multiple planets is still fine despite everything I've said however, as long as it's made clear that you can only stray so far from your ship on each of these planets to preserve the logical consistency of the setting (not that the setting will be good or there will be any logical consistency in anything else related to the setting lmfao).
