The fact Sony/Hello Games embargo'ed the reviews for No Man's Sky this close to release was pretty telling in hindsight. Then you have Sony going after impressions of the game on Youtube prior to launch...not because they were afraid of spoilers really, but more like they did not want people to know Sean and co underdelivered.
For the record, I think Sean is a very passionate dev. But he still lied about many features in the game. It's easy to say that you did not expect so many players to play the game at launch...but it is basically an online game in 2016, what did you expect? Also, I don't buy this at all for the player interactions. So it's just yet another broken promise and some people bought the game thinking you could MAYBE interact with another player on a lonely planet if you are extremely lucky. But you CAN'T.
I don't care if you tell me this is not the point of the game. It's still a feature that was confirmed time and again by Sean directly. But No Man's Sky was destined to not be groundbreaking: after all, you can't bank on random content to make a game. Manually crafted games with perfect pacing, characters, quests and set pieces will always, always trump random content. Especially when said content isn't backed by fun enough systems (mining, combat, etc.).