You would be correct in that assessment, given their next big game Starfield offshored THE MAPS to non-developer sources lmao.I'm convinced the settlement bullshit in 4 was tacked on so they wouldn't have to create actual towns with unique NPC's and handcrafted quests. Instead they shoved that onto the player alongside endless "radiant quests" and called it a day.
They basically try to remove as much hand-crafted content as possible in each release, soon we'll actually have to learn programming languages to get the game launcher working (or just buy the 'preorder edition' launcher creationclub package))