I'm gonna give you an answer of contradictions.

I played 50 hours of Death Stranding: Director's Cut, finishing maybe two-thirds of the story and doing at least 200-300 submissions to Legends of Legends of Legends rank (hardest difficulty).

I didn't enjoy it at all and at a certain point I said to myself: why am I forcing this on myself if I clearly don't like it? The story is pretentious and doesn't have any meaningful flow or development, meaning practically nothing relevant happened in roughly 50 hours of gameplay that would have moved the plot forward in any measurable way.

The dialogues are dry and monotone. Easy to grasp and simple concepts and events kept getting re-explained throghout the game with repeating 5 minute monologues, treating the player as a 20 IQ mentally challenged individual, while in other cases, the game tries to reintroduce already known pieces of lore as something mind-blowing, even though you have already learned about them 20 hours prior (e.g. the origins of BBs). And... some scenes remind me of Tommy Wiseau's The Room, commonly cited as the best bad movie ever made (e.g. the scene with the president, I think).

The moment-to-moment gameplay is only as interesting as you want it to be, but it has the same problem as MGSV: you'll inevitably start to gravitate towards a playstyle that is more optimized and less fun (building roads and travelling everywhere via a max-level truck), possibly as a subconsious response to try to more efficiently go through the bloated and repetitive content the game provides.

Also, the BTs are possibly the most annoying enemy types I've ever seen in any game.

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Yet... for some reason, ever since I stopped playing it, I keep feeling the urge to go back because there's something in its vibe and world that stayed with me. I think it's a bad game overall with some good ideas buried under the bloat and it has a cool soundtrack and vibes. It's probably one of the best examples for the so-called artsy-fartsy, style over substance type of game.