People have already been debating this exact question for over two decades on the contrast between Daggerfall-Skyrim. People remark on the scale of Daggerfall as a positive but the consequences are obvious--you don't achieve a map size of 210k square kilometres without sacrificing something massive during the development process, which for Daggerfall meant it's almost entirely proc gen and thus the overwhelming majority of the world is barren and copy-pasted.
People will say Morrowind, on the other hand, is far too small; it's only a tiny little island and they had to resort to tricks like a minuscule render distance to make it feel larger (actually just a hardware limitation that kinda worked out thematically), but Morrowind has far more depth in that just about every inch of its map has something to notice, explore or interact with that is also tied tangibly to the world because the upside of not going for a huge map is proc gen doesn't enter the picture and every part of the map is hand-built, ensuring each of those parts gets far more attention as individual components.
Oblivion is widely regarded as comically small for what it's attempting to depict, but Skyrim is where things came to a head; Oblivion was too small and criticised for it, and therefore Skyrim needed to be bigger by every marketable metric; the result was the compromise between your big world scale and small world detail, where an extremely minimal dose of proc gen was dipped into to make the hand-building process more feasible and we got a world map that if you replay today feels pretty small and can only be called not barren because it's littered with literal theme park dungeons which almost never have any real connection to the world beyond it's a source of enemies to kill, loot to acquire and occasionally selected from a predetermined list of locations for a random radiant quest objective to be spawned into the boss chest.
So from everything I've seen those are the two extremes you're caught between and have to choose from for your contentment. Do you want the smaller world which had a lot more attention put into every part of it you experience, or do you want the largest world which definitely had to have a helping hand from procedural generation so the developers are allowed to see their families ever again and consequently has all the size you want but it's almost entirely filled with (if it's filled at all) detached, padded content devoid of most tailoring or relevance to the world narrative? Or do you want to take the middle ground and get a Skyrim world where story and character are backseats to walking around the somewhat bigger world which is mostly filled with dungeons tied far more to the game mechanically than narratively?
While I see you point in this , what I want is more in line what has been done previously for top down RPG's like the older BG and well the new Pathfinder Kingmaker etc , have an overland map that you travel on to several smaller areas to get the sence of travel distance , nothing else !!
