If we’re talking about what is subjective and what isn’t, I think this is definitely subjective.
If you know what you’re doing when you start playing the game, yeah, sure.
If you don’t, if you don’t know that players have organized portal networks, malls, cities, and you just land in the woods alone, it takes time to figure out how to interact with the rest of the community.
So if you mostly encounter dead places with nobody living there, you can get the feeling of being in a dead game. And to be fair, I’m guilty of that too, I couldn’t bear 
the idea of losing the place I’ve worked on for close to two years, so I made arrangements to give it to HOST. But I think it’s currently a (mostly) dead place (not to cr@p over HOST’s efforts).
Took me easily a solid month before I actually started REALLY getting deep into the game. First I was making my ‘dirt house’ (< sighs > I miss that place. Should’ve taken more screenshots when I had it)
Then I had to figure out everything else, find where the hubs were, what planet had what ressources, the colors, the boons, how Forging works, where to find hunts (and when you live in France like I do, most of the hunts were happening during the night)… a LOT of informations you can ONLY get here on the forum.
But the one thing I was never really about to get into was all the part about selling things.
I can testify that not every player is good at being ‘a merchant of goods’, or good at building, or good at hunting.
EDIT : To whoever keeps flagging posts (and I suspect it’s the same person) of people you don’t like with no valid reason to do so, just know that this is Flagging abuse, and you’re only risking to get the moderation team if not the devs (who have better things to do than to check on flags) to look into you by doing this further.