Having lots of empty planets is realistic to be fair, but realism is unfortunately boring a lot of the time.
Personally I’m a big fan of the game but I’ve been pining for a Bethesda game for a long time and I will always enjoy a fetch quest where I have to kill bandits. I totally understand the criticism (although I do think it’s slightly blown out of proportion because it’s Bethesda).
Overall, the game is good. It’s not great (yet, anyway) but I’m 30ish hours in and I feel like I’m 10hrs in. The quest line I focused on after getting my bearings seems to be one of the better ones and while I prefer exploring in a skyrim/fallout way I have had plenty of fun just dropping by random planets to see what I can find. It’s at least very obvious which planets are boring before you even land on them. Ultimately in real life I think we can be pretty confident that the vast majority of planets and solar systems would be boring as fuck. Starfield needs some aspect of realism so having one or 2 planets or moons/stations per system that are actually worth visiting is a good call in my opinion.