For me, the primary appeal of a Bethesda RPG is that “take off in a direction, you’ll find a story” feel

I don't entirely disagree.

The insanely frequent, lengthy cutscenes cut into the continuous flow

You mean the ship going into warp or landing loading screen? There aren't really a ton of cutscenes. If I had to give a tedious downside, it would be the "power minigame" but at least it ends with a violent encounter with a strongish enemy 9 times out of 10

The choice to use procedural generation was odd and really took away from the more intentional feel of prior Bethesda games

See, THIS might be where my age plays me. My first Bethesda game was called "Arena", and it was all procedural. My second Bethesda game was "Daggerfall" and it was ABSURDLY huge procedural. I've never seen some procedural elements as a downside to extend the plot (and in fact, Skyrim's radiant quest system is procedure), as long as there was sufficient hand-made content.

Now here's the thing. By all reports (both self-reports that can be questioned, but also people who dug into game files), Starfield has more handmade content than Skyrim. It's just that the thousand planets above and beyond that were procedural. I LIKE that balance. A lot. It solves the "Morrowind problem" (Morrowind was slammed at first because the world was SO much smaller than Daggerfall's) for me while still giving you 60-80 hours of handcrafted stories, characters, maps, etc. But I can see how other people who dive into into the procedural content might step back and say "boy this game is so reptitious". Sometimes our gameplay loops define our enjoyment. I know I hated Persona 2 for years for the dumbest reason ever - I got addicted to the casino minigame and lost track of the story, then found the casino game too tedious and I had no desire to play the game anymore.