I mean I wouldn't necessarily compare it there because NMS at least had purely random creatures and Starbound literally included these features in the early access build before removing them rather than promising but not delivering.

If I had to guess I'd say it's more of a case of the creative team really really wanted their (barely existent) game story to be the centrepiece rather than exploration, and wanted to implement features which might be hard to code for in pure random environments so just scrapped the difficult parts.