Dragon's Dogma had fast travel in spades.
Up to 10 or 12 portal stones to collect and place at will, single-use ferrystones to make use of them and at some point an Infinite Ferrystone to get rid of that money sink.
Anyone playing the game for more than one hour and half should be aware of this.
After 1 hour and a half you are still in the "tutorial" basically, you are far from having fast travel in spades after 90 min (or even 10 hours, especially on hard mode where progression is way slower).
What you say is true but you make it sound way easier and streamlined than how it was, let's be real here.
You have to first collect these 10 rare items, they are heavy and you have to bring them in your inventory, and it's nowhere near as comfy as "modern fast travel".
It was on purpose and i'm kinda ok with it but nobody has the right to criticize people who didn't liked how fast travel was handled in that game and the infinite stone was added with a remaster, many people played the vanilla game.
Also, not every dude has much time to play with a family and shit, and it's not like other great open world didn't had fast travel, from elden to w3 to zelda tokt and more, it is not something that inerenthly make a game worse.