I mean, speak for yourself, but I spent most of my time in Daggerfall (my first TES game) just screwing around with the game mechanics and learning all sorts of fun and interesting ways to make use of the tools they gave you. And while most of the world was iterative, there were actually cool secrets you could find randomly by exploring, like a witch's coven which gathers on one specific day of the year, or such things. Probably the biggest thing that I love about the games is when you figure out a particularly good style and become a walking god, because the devs didn't try to stamp out that sort of emergent gameplay back then.

It's totally fine if it's not your thing, but these games are widely loved for a reason.