Red dead 2 is obscenely tiny by comparison.

Literally everything about game development is a trade off. It’s not possible to make a game at 5% of Starfield’s scale as polished as a rockstar game. The difference in scale is too massive.

The scope of Bethesda games is a huge part of the point. Nobody else makes anything similar to what they offer.

BG3 is a top down CRPG. Having 3D assets and being a 3D game with full 3D movement aren’t the same thing.

And whether it’s more content is debatable. There’s more pure story and production, with a lot of branching, but the overall amount of space (not counting Starfield’s use of negative space because of the setting) is significantly smaller. And even in terms of total number of quest lines, Starfield has a lot. Which you can get more time out of is all about personal preference. There will be people with 1000 hours in both, easy.