24 years ago, a then-little-known game called Baldur's Gate used another solution. I don't know if it had been notably used before, nor what games used it afterwards, but it worked pretty well in Baldur's Gate. The solution can be summarised as such : "Your journey lasted 16 hours".
By breaking the game world into explorable-playable maps, the game can keep exploration exciting while making the world feel big and credible.
Ultimately it comes down to what works for each person, but to me this compromise gains the benefit of neither. Exploration doesn't feel exciting to me because it's kept strictly into "exploration areas". I think The Outer Worlds is the worst recent offender of this. The limited size of each zone made me constantly reminded of the "gaminess" of it by constantly blocking my path with invisible walls. On the flip-side, a single box saying "the journey took x hours" doesn't convey a sense of time either. Pathfinder could tell me a journey took 2 hours or 5 days, and it really made no difference to me: what mattered was how long I had to wait for the piece to move (which, more often than not, felt like a waste of my time, and on longer journeys I would just mess around on my phone).
Just my two cents, but for me this is a case of getting the worst of both, with none of the pros.
