Not that surprising. Starfield is still in that awkward spot for Bethesda games where you have the base game, which is fine, but not much in the way of interesting mods. Meanwhile Skyrim has over a decade's worth of mods made for it. If you want to do something in Skyrim that isn't in the game chances are someone has made a mod for it. Meanwhile Starfield is just Starfield.

Not much by way of Starfield mods out yet. There are a whole lot of Skyrim mods.

I bet that the bulk of the people playing Skyrim aren't playing vanilla Skyrim.

I been playing nothing but daggerfall and morrowind

Isn't it like this Bethesda's go-to move now? I mean, it always seems like Bethesda releases a thing that people are really excited for, then people are all like "It sucks!" but then 2 or 3 years later people are still playing it and enjoying it and saying "OK, it's not THAT bad..."