Yeah, honestly, for all the issues with the game (and there are many, don't get me wrong), I find that I've been getting a lot of the Fallout experience I was hoping for out of the game. If I had a complaint about the fundamentals of the game, it's that I'm still uncertain that the changes to the game design to accommodate multiple players were all for the best. Workshops tend to glue you somewhat to a specific area because you need to clear out the resource collectors every so often and defend it from attack occasionally, and I think that's at odds with the exploration-heavy gameplay.
People, when you do run into them, generally just do the awkward "hi hello I'm not here to kill you" dance, occasionally accompanied by "but you're blocking the way to the vendor bot could you please move." The only times I've ever had meaningful interactions with others have been a) early in the beta, when someone died in front of me and I could've revived them (but didn't know how so they died anyways, oops), and b) when I met up with a bunch of strangers to explore a blast zone. Oh, and once someone took a workshop from me, and it wasn't worth taking back from them because whatever. Besides that, you just get the occasional burst of high-level enemies if you happen to cross paths with someone way higher level than you, which is an unfortunate byproduct that I'm not sure how to fix.
Taken from the perspective of "Fallout, but a survival loot game" and compared to stuff like Subnautica or No Man's Sky, I find it hits a sweet spot. It offers the exploration and crafting from those other games, but provides a great deal more story and mission design. And though there are elements I wish it did better, and a lot of stability issues Bethesda really needs to sort out, I think there's a solid game waiting to happen here. Should you pay full price for it, or jump in now? That's going to be up to the individual, and as it stands it's not an unqualified recommendation. You need to go in understanding exactly what you're getting, and if it's not worth the price to you then you're perfectly in the right to stay away for now (or forever, if that's your choice).
I get that people don't like Fallout 76 for many reasons, only some of which have to do with a No Man's Sky-style maelstrom of accusation and hate. There are legitimate reasons to dislike this game for sure, even if you set aside the bugs and issues that will likely get fixed in the coming months. But I think there are also plenty of legitimate reasons to like the game, and that people who do like it aren't suddenly to blame for the decline and fall of good games everywhere by letting Bethesda off the hook, or whatever half-baked conspiracy theory people want to throw out today.
