I mean, find me another game with the interactability of a Bethesda game and I'll consider it brutual honestly. Most open world games, and even linear ones, are like museums. They're made to walk around and not touch anything. There aren't many games that I can pickpocket guards and have whatever item I gave them or took away from them still there a long time later…. And that's for a 2011 game.
Unless of course when we talk about generations we literally just mean graphics and how pretty a game looks.
You can always tell the people who have little coding & design understanding when any random title's intrinsic value, or more closely...lack of value, is measured by how pretty it looks.
There's so many things BGS titles do under the hood that other titles never even attempt. And while a thousand cheese wheels collected in your house might be big one, there's also other major systems like the model rigging that allows any npc to wear any piece of clothing/armor/weapons in the game (where the ai is coded to "upgrade their gear" when possible).
It's a shame to see BGS get dunked on for focusing on novel & unique game systems running under the surface that have a direct impact on world interactivity and immersion. The ignorance bred from not understanding that any game engine has a hard ceiling on raw computational power. And how a dev has to decide how much resources go into audio-visual presentation vs. interlocking game systems running behind the scenes. How ambitious this work is and challenging it can be to get right (disparate background rulesets playing nice with one another).
BGS attempts to thread the needle between presentation values found in large productions and more systems-driven focused productions found in the indie space such as Project Zomboid. Few devs have successfully balanced these two worlds as well as BGS.
Like I can totally dig it not being one's cup of tea. But it'll never not be baffling to see an enthusiast forum not grasp simple technical bandwidth limitations in game development. And quite frankly it makes talking BGS on Era an exhausting exercise.