Look, I agree with everything from the first paragraph, and the CE does seem to have a lot of technical debt that's particularly shown in Starfield, which is trying to do something different than the other games. The engine being "old" is bad though (I know you didn't make it, but it's often said), and it being "technically behind" other engines is really true in all ways.

The Creation Engine had been adapted by Bethesda to be very good at making Bethesda games. They know the tools and the quirks, and they can modify it to make it do what they want. It has been continuously added onto, just as Unreal Engine has been continuously added onto since 1995. The number after the engine name doesn't mean anything besides where they decided to mark a major version change, which may or may not include refactoring and things like that. I have a guess that CE2 (Starfield's engine) is only called CE2 because people on the internet keep saying the engine is old, but tell them to use UE (which is approximately the same age as Gamebryo) but adds numbers to the end.