I watched some videos on it after it released and for about a week after my whole YouTube frontpage was full of Starfield-bashing (many with several hundred thousand views) so it's definitely out there.

I don’t hate it, I’m mostly just ambivalent to it. It felt like Bethesda’s Ubisoft moment, where they went from being a company that had been doing something really well and switched to doing something really safe…which is iust boring and generic nowadays. For the first ten or fifteen hours it was like ooh my first Bethesda game in ages! And then I put it down and never felt compelled to go back. I don’t hate it, I don’t love it, I don’t really feel anything towards it. Skyrim grabbed me from jump street and I was all in, same with FO…idk I really wanted to like Starfield…but I just never really felt anything towards it.

I'm not sure how, you got lucky.

Lemmy was filled with posts linking to clickbait articles from PcGamer bashing the game.

YouTube just flooded my feed with videos about how Starfield was the worst game ever made, modern gaming was dying or something of the sort after watching a couple positive reviews.

Even in comment sections, whenever I mentioned some nitpic I had about the game, I'd get answers bashing the game as if I had said it was terrible.

It was pretty much everywhere for a month and a half to the point I just decided to stop trying to find discussions on it.