Is it actually smaller, though?

Don't get me wrong, I fully agree in spirit, it just seems like several aspects royally screwed over the map design so it felt much smaller.

1. The bay being the main area where you started meant everything felt far more like linear progression regardless of where one wandered to.
2. The island bifurcating the bay made the bay itself far more prominent, isolated, and greatly reduced how many under water biomes were simply 'there' to explore. You always HAD to wander out in one of two directions to get to some other under water biome open to the surface, of which there were only, what? three?
3. Most later game biomes were solo, single entrance offshoots of the already limited 'main' areas. This made them feel much more like explicitly added game assets instead of areas you'd just wander in to while exploring.
4. The story and the game design itself seemed to want the on-land biome to be more cool than it was. It was ONE biome, and not even the type of biome that the game is known for.
5. The sea truck is cool in concept, but when every area is disparate and isolated, it SUCKED to drive a loaded truck to any of them.
6. The "AI" companion (and really, the story over all) totally and completely popped the isolated explorative feeling of the game.

Basically, the basic design of the map and story ran completely counter to everything that made the first such an amazing experience.

The individual biomes and assets themselves were still great, but they were composed in such a way that left them ... not greater than the sum of their parts.

I think it could've been a banger if they had interconnected more biomes and made them larger so there was ANY point to dragging a loaded sea truck to them. The land biome could have worked if they made it much more like a real arctic; an ocean mostly covered in ice sheets instead of it just being some random biome "over there" largely literally on land. The ice worm would've been waaay cooler if the player had to wonder if it could make an appearance under water, for example, even if it never did. The snow fox (or what ever the land vehicle was called, it's been a while) could've been way cooler if it wasn't for one biome "over there", too.

I don't know how much larger it'd need to be, but a little more creativity in mixing the biomes together would've gone a LONG way.

If you visit the official website of krafton https://www.krafton.com/en/ you should get this pop up:

Basically, Krafton claims that the 3 founders they fired did not do their job in overseeing the project, leading to a game without any direction. Since the game would not meet their standards, they decided to rework a lot and push the release date back.

This is an official statement of a company, meaning they can be (and if I read it correctly have been) sued for slander should they lie here. So a legal department looked over this and decided "Yep, we can claim that they abandoned responsibilities, we can prove that in court". Whether or not this is actually true or just an attempt to regain public opinion, it's a real shitshow.