You said Starfield doesn't get boring as quickly as TOW.
Which is totally wrong. Starfield starts off boring and never lets up.
Here I unsurprisingly disagree. Once the annoying railroaded tutorial/intro section is over (after you first have to enter the lodge) and you can actually ignore the main quest there's a fair bit to do and discover. The faction quests have their moments in spite of their juvenile and amateurish writing/design, and provide some quite good rewards (apart from Ryujin), there's a bunch of more interesting unique encounters in space you can (unfortunately randomly) stumble upon, ships to board (including zero gravity boarding actions) and steal or build yourself.
The problem the game does have however is that there's an overwhelming amount of filler (including shitty low level quests in the 3 big cities), and the star map is a glorified slot machine as far as finding interesting things goes. Planetary exploration is even worse, because it's all just copy and pasted dungeons with spacers and maybe aliens, which is why one might as well ignore anything but quest-related POI and the landing mechanic as a whole unless it is a named settlement. And if you're following the main quest you're going to have a rather boring time.
TOW's problem is that when you start it you think it's going to go places, and then the illusion breaks when you realize they had no idea where to go with this, and even worse you won't see or experience anything new or interesting rather fast. It is monotony the game and for me Monarch was the point where I started to realize it. Starfield does offer some ways to break up the monotony and I found enough in it not to get bored somehow.
In any case this is a pick your poison scenario, I picked mine and you picked yours.
TOW has, at least somewhat, interesting world-building and exploring, but then gets boring quickly.
"Corporations bad and incompetent, everything is falling apart" is not interesting world-building. There's no nuance, explorations of the implications (besides the "everything is falling apart") or clever new jokes built around it (if they were aiming for a Futurama/Rick and Morty like science fiction joke setting) as you play the game, they just put an idea on the whiteboard during some design meeting and never decided to elaborate or flesh it out, just hammering "corporations bad" jokes at every step. The illusion breaks the moment you realize this. For all of bethepizda's writing's flaws and clumsy execution they at least tried to add shades of gray to their freedumb space cowboys, made their libertarianism result in a corporate narco city-state ruled by crime and corruption on one planet, and have de facto oligarchs in charge of the whole faction doing shady things. They tried giving the UC authoritarian overtones to go with the shiny utopia look. While Obshitian just said "corporations bad, everything is falling apart, there are rebels" and left it at that.
As for exploring, you get 3 cramped maps and Monarch is about as linear as something like Kashyyk in KOTOR. About the only real exploring that game has is indeed the first hub, and that location just feeds into an illusion the game is going to be good. You think "oh this is an extended starting location like goodsprings in new vegas, it's going to get more open and free once you leave" and it doesn't.
But I will give you that the exploration in the starting area, forgot what it was called, was definitely better than whatever Starfield offers at any point and thus TOW's is better, because bethpizda fucked up both the space part and the surface area part. Starfield doesn't have any actual "world" exploration rather a slot machine, just random jumping to systems hoping an interesting derelict or space station is spawned by the RNG as a random contact icon.
