Ragnarok.Jessikah said:
»even though the more of it you have, the less it resembles a game.
QoL is just a design choice, IMO.
If you have an open world game that the core experience is world exploration and immersion, fast traveling is a bad design choice in this case.
If the core experience is looting in dungeons or story, then fast traveling eliminates the walking time so the core experience gets delivered to players faster.
Players who complained about "waste of time" in a review is generally means the game was sold to the wrong target audience with wrong expectations. If they bought a game, expect the main gameplay is looting in dungeons, but instead they spent 40 min walking to the next dungeon, of course they'll leave "waste of time" review.