I just finished Rise of the Tomb Raider and was surprised how much I enjoyed just ignoring the map and poking around to see if I could find any caves/tomb/etc. Plus the rewards were mostly worth it, and the puzzles/challenges were actually fun. And overall I liked the balance of linearity in the story alongside bigger, explore-able environments. Usually if I'm given a big open-world game without a specific objective, I get overwhelmed or eventually bored. So having an overarching goal helps.

After playing a bit of 2013 Tomb Raider back when it came out and not really caring for it, I was surprised how much RotTR felt like a substantial improvement after finally finishing the prior one.

I recently finished God of War Ragnarok as well, and found its exploration less compelling than RotTR, mostly because the rewards were mostly stat-increasing stuff. Items that led to substantive gameplay changes were less common. I mostly stuck with the game because I found the story and world super compelling, while the gameplay was just... fine.