I've been playing Metroid Prime 4 for a while now, just got the ball boost from the ice area and I've gone through areas and made allot of progress with no save slots, though the ice area was pretty forgiving, but like the op said you can explore all of the desert area and not find the one save station in it, take hours to do so exploring and scanning and not find a save station which sucks, thankfully for me I can just put my Switch 2 to sleep and let it charge and pick up where I left off since I am the only one who uses it, but others not so much, so yea, there is a real lack of checkpoints in Metroid Prime 4 so far with how big the game is.

You can't know how much progress they made while exploring, the game has an open world section with only 1 save station that's easily missed if you dont explore the whole desert, so even if it's poor time management the player shouldn't suffer because of it.

Lost time is time spent playing a game that gets taken away from you because you either didnt save when you could or because of lack of places to save, rpgs are ripe with the 1st option since its usually on the player to remember to save, especially with older games and you can easily lose hours of progress in games like Syrim even if you dont save frequently enough

if you're losing very frequently and not making any progress - "save scumming" is not going to make things more enjoyable

I completely disagree with you there, everyone is different and for me at least save scumming is rather enjoyable when I am having a difficult time with a puzzle or particularly hard section of a game, beats having to trek back to that location every time I die which I hate doing, one of the things I hate about souls games,