It is because most devs don't make actual open world games, but linear narrative games set in open worlds (which is almost completely opposite to what proper open-word/open-ended game should be).
I think your initial reasoning is very constrained since it takes into account only modern crop of "open-world" action-adventure/RPG/pseudo-RPG games, which trace their lineage all the way back to tabtletop D&D, but most fundamentally don't understand the balance of it (mostly that "overworld" is not a safe place for you to fuck around endlessly, and that there needs to be a cost for it).
But there are also open-world/open-ended games that stand near the top of greatest open world games ever made that don't have anywhere near that structure and work great (Elite and Sid Meier's Pirates being just two examples).
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