I am really conflicted on this, and I think there needs to be some balance or cost/reward. I mostly agree though.
An example I often use about this is in MMOs. WoW felt like a huge world, especially back in vanilla. You could fly end to end and never hit a loading screen, it felt awesome. If you gave me a map of Azeroth and asked me to label all the zones, I probably could. It’s moved a bit more to people teleporting place to place, but I still can fly end to end of a continent.
On the other hand, FFXIV is a series of maps with loading zones between all of them (a necessity because of the older console architecture, I understand) and teleports in every town. You never actually go end to end of Eorzea. If you gave me a map of Eorzea and asked me to label only the three majors cities on it, I doubt I could. It is definitely convenient to just be able to warp around place to place for a trivial amount of currency.
It takes a lot out of the feeling of “world” to just have a bunch of arbitrary areas, I admit. It’s a tough balancing act between player convenience and player immersion.