I agree with most of this except for the "no aspect of the game was great".
It's fucking GORGEOUS, there are countless times that I just wanted to dick around in photomode to find the perfect shot because I couldn't believe how beautiful the scene was.
Fighting robot dinosaurs is great fun. Yes, the AI is dumb and the artificial boundaries suck but the combat is better than any other open world game I can think of. And it's got robot dinosaurs that shoot laser beams for fucks sake, that's cool as fuck.
Most of the story leans on tropes you've seen in Sci-Fi many times before but Aloy was, for the most part, a really good character and I thought the way the game ended for her was absolutely perfect.
But yeah, shitty sidequests, crafting/resource gathering busywork is the bane of modern gaming, the checklist approach to including things just because other open world games have it, awful inventory management, follow yet another trail etc all drag it down but at the end of the day I still got a decent amount of enjoyment out of the game.
Is it a great game? Not really.
Does it provide you with great moments? Hell yes.
Would I play the sequel? Yeah, probably. If they got rid of some of the extraneous bullshit then I'd probably be on board for day one.