In my opinion, having played both at launch, it's a pretty similar experience, except I could see what NMS wanted to be. It wanted to be an exploration game. It just didn't have any systems to make that interesting.

Starfield doesn't want to be an exploration game I don't think, but it does have things to explore but it never makes it interesting or necessary. It's sci-fi, but that genre is supposed to be used as a lense to look at real-world issues, and it doesn't critique anything except maybe saying pirates are bad. None of the companions are interesting enough to care about, and they're almost all identical, so it isn't about them. The looting gameplay is pretty bad where you just do the same five dungeons over and over, so that obviously wasn't a priority. I just can't think of a single thing it actually makes important to the experience, so I don't know what it's trying to be.