It's effectively a very fancy Fallout 4 mod. Same base engine, same crafting and upgrade system, same style of gameplay, same level up system (with very minor changes).

It even has the lack of world content that a mod project would!

I picked up NMS pretty recently after being thoroughly disappointed with Starfield and to be entirely honest it seems to just be the same game but better, in almost all aspects. It hits all the same core notes, did it first, and did it better.