At no point did I mention realism.

Yep.

You're right.

Realistic open worlds are generally boring, to most players.

Thats why almost no popular open world games have realistic distance scaling.

Skyrim, for example, is a teeny tiny place, compared to how large the lore describes it as, everything is scaled in a kind of exaggerated way, same with all GTA games, even RDR and 2, they're not even close to being realistically scaled, they're scaled based... basically on an estimate of a player's average attention span.

You want realistically scaled?

Go play an ARMA game, and just go on a hike, over a close to one to one scale replication of an actual island or penninsula, for a real world entire day.

Yeah that shit's boring as fuck to most people.

... But I did not at any point say that a good open world is a realistic world, or anything like that, but thats what you appear to have read, out of what I wrote.

Fascinating.

Anyway, what you should do to make an open world that doesnt suck, is make it interesting, in an actual game mechanical sense, not merely 'pretty'.

Maybe as you travel, enemies of one kind or another have a chance of spawning nearby and cresting over a hill or emerging from a forest.

RDR2 does shit like this very well, oh I'm just gonna relax, trot along, enjoy the scenery... and ... my throat has been ripped out by a pack of wolves, goddamnit.

Or you go for the Bethesda approach and have 500, one time discoverable locations with basically some kind of a mini dungeon or staged scenario you can wander into.

Or you can do the Kenshi approach, no real questlines, just simulate the entire world as a kind of sandbox that tens of thousands of other npcs live in, do their own thing in... with actually closer to a realistic sense of distsnce scaling... and just give the player save states and the ability to fastforward or pause time, by default... and maybe they bumble in to some particularly interesting people, or maybe its oops all beakthings, or maybe you've now been enslaved by either cannibals or the Holy Nation, while you were afk for your literal 12 mile hike across the map.

Or you could just make some kind of game where fast travelling requires the player to engage in something on the order of a hacking/lockpicking minigame, to... keep the wheels from falling off or something, I dunno.

Maybe vehicles are simulated in some kind of way that... if you're reckless and innatentive, you'll break em, and now you're fucked, in the middle of nowhere. State of Decay 2 comes to mind, sort of.

Point is... there are many ways you can make travelling itself into an engaging, alternate form of the game itself, or a kind of minigame, or a way to experience some kind of story or plot development, or reward the player for picking up on contextual cues during transit, punish them for missing them...

Hell, make a minigame out of trying to pick a song to listen to that your npc companion doesn't hate, throw in guitar hero style karaoke minigame, why the hell not? maybe it can boost or demerit your relationship with that npc, land you on different paths of a branching storyline.

... Travel doesnt need to be realistic.

It just needs to be more interesting, rewarding, engaging, than skipping it.