I mean, they straight up said that 90% of planets will be empty.

As far as spreading out the handcrafted content goes, in my 60 hours it's been pretty good, but I also deliberately stick primarily to actual quests, only dipping into random exploration and proc-gen mission board quests like bounties and cargo delivery on occasion. I was initally worried that the handcrafted stuff would be limited to the three major cities, but there's plenty of other towns and locations out there. I think there's like three small towns just in the Sol system. It feels like every other system has one or two big handcrafted locations or questlines. I came across stuff like a resort town, a small assortment of settlers I had to negotiate a mutual defense pact for, an abandoned zero-g casino space station, a mercenary bar/motel with the absolute motherload of contraband (and a free ship), just to name a few.

The side and faction quests also are almost entirely handcrafted locations and not just clearing out enemies in generic locations like half the stuff in FO4 was. All the proc-gen quests have been relegated to Mission Boards, so every quest you get from an NPC will be an actual quest, although I had to do one single proc-gen mission to join one of the factions.

Also I'm surprised you saw that many game breaking bugs on streams, because it's actually a very stable release. There's some of the usual Creation Engine physics stuff, or an NPC might stand on a table or something, but I haven't really encountered all that many bugs.