They are lazy and retarded. More people are noticing this and now gravitating to traditionally structured content that they refer to as "set pieces."

They all follow the same pizza-style format where you have a few towns peppered throughout an arbitrary plane of land with smaller areas of interest interspersed throughout. It is boring and beaten to death.

The only exception is the DLC of cyberpunk where they gave players access to a tiny town called Dogtown. It was small and packed to the brim with enemies and shit to do that it was more fun and made more sense to walk everywhere in that small town. You would have a firefight in front of a major building and as that clears up, a payload drops and initiates a turf war between factions while you jump into another clusterfuck of patrolling enemies.