Except they failed terribly in making travelling fun. I had to go from Vernwoth to Harve over 15 times in my playthrough and it doesn't even have an oxcart so its teleport or walking. If you walk there you have to fight 3-5 packs of goblins, a cyclops, 1-2 ogres, maybe a drake, a ton of lizards and some slimes. Every. Single. Time. Enemy density makes every travel by foot a chore and they respawn way too fast. Nothing encourages that playstyle, even if they say so otherwise, either you run from every fight which sucks or you make a 10min stroll into a 1hr mess of a combat and end up being extremely overlevelled, further ruining the fun of the game. DD:DA also had a focus on travel but still gave you the eternal ferrystone, So it is in fact functionality lost, because we lost the ability to choose how we travel, how we enjoy the game.

Btw, in DD:DA I only used the eternal ferrystone for escort quests because they were terribly designed, for everything else I walked because it was actually super fun and often chill.