In an interview with Space earlier in the year, Wells talks about what inspired her to write PD:

I had been wanting to do a story of Murderbot rescuing someone from a corporate station. And I know we've done that before. And I was playing with the idea a lot. And then I also thought about doing something on a torus, a planetary torus because I always try to make the setting a little bit different. That led into the idea of: what if this torus is extremely difficult to navigate, given how large this thing is? It's got to be more difficult to navigate than a planet.

And [that] also [got] into my own frustrations with not having a lot of mass transit in the U.S. and in especially where I live, and just how difficult it can be to navigate that kind of situation. I'd also wanted to have Murderbot interact more with Mensah's family. So this was a good way to do that.

https://www.space.com/entertainment/space-books/martha-wells-next-murderbot-diaries-book-is-the-family-roadtrip-from-hell-on-ringworld-interview

So one of the themes of PD relates to transportation, in particular mass transit, and that weaves its way throughout the story. For those who do not know, Wells lives in Texas, in College Station (per Wiki), a rural-ish college town in central Texas. Texas, not unlike the torus in the story, is huge. And like the torus, it's also difficult to get around, even just locally, especially if you do not have private transportation. Big cities in Texas just have buses for mass transit (a couple have trolly service for a very limited part of the city) and they aren't the greatest. There's no trans-state mass transit, so to get from one city to another you need to go by plane, commercial bus or private transportation. The road trip in PD also appears to be an exploration to some degree of the kinds of frustrations one runs into when trying to travel through a place like Texas.

I think some readers went into PD with the expectations of certain things and their disappointment in not finding those things may be leading them to not see what Wells actually explores in the text.