Exaggeration is an art form in here. Apparently I wasted 60 hours of my life being entertained by lies :)
Perhaps after playing Elite Dangerous: Horizons for months I had a better idea what to expect from procedural generation and had already build up a lot of tolerance for repetitive gameplay :) Exploration in ED is exactly the same, you fly to a system, hope it looks pretty, if it does, stay for a while, then move on. Except it's a lot more fun jet packing around while tracking down wildlife than it is to hunt down rocks on airless rocky planets in hopes to find some polonium at a rate of about 1 per hour. The initial grind in NMS takes a few hours, in ED a few months!
But true, it gets repetitive. Stuff starts to all look alike, it's just how we are wired. Another forest, another desert, blah. Exploration is a niche genre, less than 10% of ED players bother to ever get out of the bubble. Hello games should have been clear about what it was, not a space trader nor survival game nor faction game nor multiplayer nor builder game, pure exploration with some lite crafting to get going.
It's a shame that instead of giving procedurally generated worlds a boost, Hello games has likely set the exploration genre back by a few years instead.