A huge number of TES people play in third person, that's one of the reasons that Bethesda always has that option in there. Especially all the mods that are centered around making your character look good, all the armor/clothing mods, etc? People like seeing their character in rpgs, even if third person controls a bit more "janky" they still will prefer it.
As far as game design, that's why I said they could compromise, allow third person for exploration (like they do it for the vehicles in Cyberpunk already). Since most games are build with shared rigging between the player characters and npc's that means it shouldn't need a ton of work in terms of animation for this area.
Whenever a player initiates combat/dialogue or whatever the game could then pull you into first person and when it's over put you back into the third person view.
