Engines are a lot more than what we can see with our eyes, unless you're a developer who actually works with Creation Engine 2 then you don't know what you're talking about in how big of an upgrade it is overall compared to Creation Engine 1. That aside, if you actually watched the Digital Foundry video then you would see how large of an upgrade Starfield is in many aspects and Digital Foundry was largely praise towards Starfield with their main criticism around facial animations.
Here is what Josh Sawyer, an actual developer who worked with Creation Engine and Unreal Engine has said about CE in the past.
"That's one of the things Bethesda's toolset makes very easy. It's super easy to make areas, super easy to modify, super easy to track assets, and it's pretty darn powerful. Look at this way: there's no way in hell that our team could have made Fallout New Vegas without that tool. It was just impossible. And if you look at the mods, it's astounding what people can do with it. I personally think that is very cool. I hope we get to the point where we can actually develop tools like that. I wouldn't say it's a personally driving ambition, it's something that I hope we do."
"I do really appreciate how easy it was in New Vegas to make stuff and modify stuff... The scripting system in the Bethesda engine is also very powerful and you can also do crazy stuff as well. But I do appreciate the ease-of-use stuff they had in Bethesda's editors"
Even today, there are few titles on the scale of a Bethesda title which also offer the level of physical simulations, Ai simulations and systems that a Bethesda title offers under the hood to make it uniquely feel like a Bethesda title. Creation Engine does things which Unreal Engine is only now catching up on, such as World Portioning (breaking world spaces into cells) which CE2 had a upgrade to in that respect as well.
As an example, the "place an item anywhere you want" may seem like a small thing when in reality it's actually a huge feat to pull off. All physical moveable objects having their positions tracked in real time and constantly stored so that you can place them wherever you want and they will remain there even if you travel across the other side of the map, but now on a galactic scale - This is partly why Starfield is CPU heavy.
It keeps all of that and improves largely in many other aspects. Watch the Digital Foundry video.
