There are 50 large Known Worlds with plenty of room (we didn’t launch with 50). There are well over 300 planets, if you include Sovereigns. There have been over 300 Sovs on average since they were introduced. There was a bad bottleneck after the official launch, but they upped the max number of players allowed on a single planet and they added the ability to spawn new planets to meet demand. I don’t know if they’re using AWS auto-scaling or if it’s a mostly manual process, but this seems to be less of an issue than it was in the beginning.
After watching numerous videos and streams of people playing this game for the 1st time, I agree that the NPE needs a lot of attention. Some of those players gave up in the sanctum. A lot of the others gave up during the initial gathering resources quests and placing beacons/plots.