In a sense, it's pretty similar to how theme parks are designed too, with the best ones being structured in much the same as a 3D collectathon level. There's usually a key focal point in the middle of the area to act as a reference, a bunch of smaller ones off to all sides meant to draw people's attention towards smaller obstacles/attractions, and clever uses of scenery and forced perspective to give the impression of a much bigger, more detailed world than's practically possible.
To be fair, being designed like a theme park isn't necessarily a bad thing. Many great sandbox type games use similar techniques in their design, and a lot has been written about how designers created open worlds to incentivise exploration/encourage people to go off the beaten track (like in this talk about The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild):
And in the olden days, a lot of this was basically necessary due to technical limitations. You couldn't get Breath of the Wild size worlds running on the N64 or PS1, so games like Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask had to use careful design to make the worlds feel a lot more complex than they actually were. Same with 3D platformers like Mario 64 or Banjo-Kazooie.
To be fair, being designed like a theme park isn't necessarily a bad thing.
No, of course not. Sometimes I want a theme park! It's just that I'm sometimes promised a world and what I get is more of a theme park. Sometimes one wants the theme park. Sometimes, one wants a more "natural" experience. This also comes in degrees, which is part of why it's tricky.
I find this the most jarring thing with Rockstar Games, and it was particularly noticeable to me in Red Dead Redemption 2.
It provides a beautiful, immersive world that is ridiculous in its attention to detail. The amount of stuff to do, accurate flora and fauna, weather effects, and NPC behavior, is ridiculous.
But the moment you start a mission, things are on rails and you lose that freedom. Or the moment you commit a crime even without witnesses the law will find you like a homing pigeon. Most entities in the wild (trees, animals) are just elaborate props and there's nothing emergent about them, and random encounters are not random at all, but just selected from a pool of missions.
They're still great, but for me it did mean having to let go of the 'immersive sim' expectation and instead approach it as a ridiculously detailed version of a 'typical' GTA-style non-emergent game.
