So much about the Starfield setting doesn't make much sense.
Starfield's setting is like, "Yeah a huge exodus happened, then a couple of wars, but it's pretty quiet now and nothing is really going on I guess??? Anyway, every planet has a bunch of human ruins or whatever.
I'd have rather had a setting where:
* Grav drive research progresses, and when it's commercially feasible a massive increase of sloppy ass Grav Drives create some massive event similar to the Black Mesa Incident
Black Mesa Incident occurs which effectively spawns an infinite number of universes all connected to that event. It also kills Earth. This is now the only entry point to the Starborn. This event also does *something* to unlock Grav Drive's full potential, taking it from a research project requiring a super computer on the moon to something you can put on a space ship.
* A massive Earth exodus happens along with a land rush where billions of people are basically fleeing earth and going to other stars for literally the first time, finding out that many inhabitable planets exist.
* The player is "the chosen one" and is the only person who can travel at FTL speed to unexplored areas. Or something. The player can choose to assist a handful of different, competing factions in their land rush goals. Each of these large quests cause some randomly generated outposts to appear in areas aligned to the quest. These faction quest lines are the primary driver of exploration and expansion of the nearby stars, and effectively progress the timeline.
* Instead of there being a bunch of unrealistic human ruins scattered across the star systems, there are instead ruins of intelligent species of different types and semi-intelligent lifeforms that form colonies you explore. A whole new technology erupts that deals with xeno biology and xenotech integration into space ships, arms, suits, buildings etc. The buildings / equipment on Mars become dusty old looking buildings where as the buildings in the final time skip are a fusion of xenotech and human engineering
* The main quest is still basically the same, you find and explore specific alien ruins and find the same magic artifacts that give you super powers. Collect all the artifacts in this timeline either by exploring these ruins or killing Starborn for them and you can portal back to a new universe at the time of the originating event.