Patient Gamers

NMS was quite literally a different looking and feeling game with maybe 5% (yes, twenty times less) of the current content and gameplay loops. Everything changed from how long it takes to gather basic resources to what order you get them in, the tutorial was streamlined and the way it picks the planet you start on was changed. There's an unbelievable amount of things to do, to the point that expeditions started existing to give players a more guided experience with fresh regular content. It's truly a far cry from where it launched, even space stations (the most static structures found in most star systems) have been overhauled and the old ones are only around as easter eggs now.

CP2077 integrated a ton of content and features from the most popular mods it had after the Anime update (particularly Vehicle Combat, from which it even took improvements to the way police spawn and act in addition to, yknow, the vehicular combat). Only a few of the core systems changed, mainly quickhacking and the way cybernetic implants are handled (also almost straight up taken from a mod). They did a balance pass on guns and made some of the weapon type features a bit different. If you didn't push too terribly far through the game on release, none of it would seem different really. The locations and behavior of weapons and enemies in general gameplay didn't change much, but access to mobility via implants was made easier (as the separated stores for them were largely equalized and merged) so it's easier for fresh players and people not using guides to finish their "build". Not quite the huge makeover NMS received, but it's definitely different in terms of progression.

While you're probably right to some extent about naysayers decreasing naturally over time, both games now have suspicious steamcharts numbers for being single player experiences. They get an influx of new players regularly in ways other similar titles don't, and it's almost certainly due to the changes in opinion of people who were playing them around their major updates, journalist articles or enthused friends.

TL;DR: No man's sky really did change that much. CP2077 didn't go as far but they've clearly made end user-oriented changes that are uncharacteristic for single player experiences.