NMS at least has planets without buildings or signs of life, but they're certain types of planets (eg. lifeless/airless) There are definitely some that have far fewer ships going around too.

NMS is more expansive in some ways, but also fairly shallow in terms of some of the core mechanics. There's a lot of things to do like having a settlement or building a fleet and sending the fleet on missions, but again, it's a bit shallow. At the beginning you're largely focused on resource collecting to build a base, and unlock upgrades. Over time you can automate a lot of this and focus on other things. However, if you don't like the resource collecting to unlock things, you're probably not going to enjoy it.

I think the space flight and combat in NMS feels better. For whatever reason, in Starfield space flight and combat feels very slow to me. It doesn't help that the UI in the starship does this weird laggy update. The seamlessness of flying into a planet can be fun in space combat and the ships will follow you.

NMS has way more copy-paste assets. Starfield at least has grand cities and some unique set pieces or a few different options ,but every crashed freighter in NMS is identical. The buildings in NMS have a tiny bit of variance but they're all like 1-2 room buildings. All space stations and space ports are identical (just the core race changes). There are pirate space stations, but they're the same basic one but darker and they've moved the vendors inward a bit into tents instead of stalls. A little bit of this is baked into the story of NMS to some extent, but that doesn't exactly help it.