I can believe the numbers here. Anecdotally, I bought this on release for my son, he spent an entire 8 hour day playing before deciding it wasn't Skyrim/Fallout 4 and wasn't as fun as those prior games. He went back to grinding in Path of Exile.
I started up a save and chose to play as a sneaky martial artist (no weapons). Playing this build simply takes longer than opening a door and blasting the bad guys with my space shotgun. I dipped out after 25hours or so - thinking "yeah a 7/10 is fair for Starfield" and restarted Cyberpunk (a much better game in every aspect). Now I'm playing through the back half of the main story and finishing off some of the longer faction quests and my 7/10 has slipped to a 5/10. It's just not a great game, there's no reason to "explore" anything, the quests are awful. Some of the scenery is pretty cool, but the actual quest stories are run here talk to person, fast travel via menu, talk to person, fast travel via menu, talk to person. No real choices (apart from one point where a character will die and you essentially choose from two bad options). I'm probably about 50 hours in now, simply because I want to finish it off and reclaim the disk space before Christmas - not because I'm having fun. Podcast on, grind through the missions, ignoring the awful writing/dialogue.
What a waste of a set of really cool ideas this turned out to be.
Edit: Oh and yeah some of those "hours" of playtime were me tabbing out to choose another podcast and getting distracted checking work email and then spending an hour or so responding, reading twitter, watching youtube, cooking etc with the game on in the background. But for any single player game I play, this will always be the case - that's why I can't play Dota - too many real-life distractions and I'd ruin any match I was in.