you can go almost anywhere after the introductory sequence, sure it has loading screens but nothing is stopping you from going wherever you wanna go, except your fuel tank capacity, but that only excludes fringe systems
Sure, but it's more like the open world of something like Dragon Age or Mass Effect, where you freely fast travel between a variety of locations, than the contiguous open worlds of prior Bethesda games. "See that moon? You can fast travel to it."
After I finally completed a playthrough I feel comfortable saying there is as much or more content than any previous Bethesda games. And it is all handcrafted (unfortunately, a lost opportunity to really lean into procgen). The only thing procgened is the random planet landing site terrain, but all the encounters, quests, dungeons, and locations themselves are all hand crafted.
It is just spread out in a different way and connected/accessed via different patterns. Overall, I think it is a better pattern.