I've been meaning to get to it because the Bethesda jank has never bothered me much and I like the expansiveness of their games, but I am a little worried about the "running around a world for 40 minutes with nothing happening" thing. Is that overstated?

It has lots of systems that are entirely optional and irrelevant to the main game/story, and it's not good at telling you this. Yes, you can go for long hikes to chart a random planet's flora and fauna, pretending this was NMS, but at best, you'd do that for the enjoyment of that.