I've thought at length about this, and i shuffle between "yes" and "no".
Pretty sure it's a "marginally yes, but mostly still no."
The biggest problem I had with FFXIII wasn't the fact that it was bad, or that it was linear. it was that I was expecting it to eventually become what i had gotten from the previous FF games up until that point, but it just never came.
I played FFXIII without too many issues all the way up until I got to Oerba, and instead of finding people, lore, cutscenes, dialogue....all i got was exactly what I did in every other area in the game.
Call me slow i guess. But it was at this exact moment it dawned on me that I had been doing the exact same thing for the past 35 hours and it was never going to get any better. The moment where "the game opens up" had come and gone already. I had literally experienced everything the game had to offer, except the truth is that I had already done that like 10 hours previous.
Going back and playing FFX, I immediately am able to spot why some people originally thought FFX was too linear. I was a huge fan of FF6-9 but I never really felt that way about FFX too much.
But the difference is that FFX just had infinitely better pacing, substance, and was just a better designed game. The game AND its story was literally molded around the idea of a more linear, purely story/event driven adventure. (You're going on a pilgrimage that basically tours the world, playing a character who doesn't know anything about it.)
FFXIII on the other hand throws you into a confusingly abstract sci-fi world, full of terms and concepts that are impossible to just instinctively "get". In the middle of a conflict that does not grow organically in the slightest, and which also unfortunately prevents you from actually exploring the world you're in....before you're kicked off of it and thrown into yet another world (pulse) that is literally nothing but empty land and random fights.
FFXIII was the start of Square giving more weight to the story they're trying to tell than the game they're supposed to be building to tell it, and as a result, both aspects ended up being extremely underwhelming.