Generally speaking perhaps but its more of an issue of scifi scale, not the franchise being Woke. Complaining about paved roads making Starfield woke is aberrant. But it's also such a small nitpick it probably deserves to be listed in one of those hour long whining YouTube videos as reason #57 of 200 about why you don't like something.
The pic he showed me of how Starfield is utter shit for having no paved roads looks generic asf. It's going for an obvious aesthetic as well unless I'm missing something from the picture.
In Firefly, the new system was settled five hundred years ago. Or like with the Terran Confederacy's thirteen core worlds, they've been settled over a century and a half and we have no paved roads in many places. In Fallout the NCR has been around for almost a century through Fallout 2 and New Vegas and things look poopee, leaving the more problematic Bethesda stuff notwithstanding. We even saw the trope in Rebel Moon really. You could say that Tatooine might be too poor or not settled enough to have paved roads, but not even to intergalactic Crimelord Jabba's Palace? That place has been settled for millenia. And you see similar scaling problems in Halo, the Aliensverse and Mass Effect and Warhammer 40K and that's just off the top of my head.
And the reasons you brought up might explain it for some of them, or maybe most of them but the point is that its so common that "No paved roads" sounds more like whining/nitpicking then actual criticism. Anyone can whine incessantly about a thing. It's not an exceptional talent. There are a lot of reasons for it but ultimately it's a pretty common scifi trope like I said.
