What is hard scifi about it? Honest question since I haven't been following it very closely, but I got the opposite impression. The little scifi I've liked has been hard scifi, but Starfield looked like space fantasy to me whenever I've paid attention to it.
The worst was when they showed off a few planets at one point and they barely looked alien to me, and were disappointingly unspectacular compared to how exotic and incredible real exoplanets are. Didn't look like places that would believably exist. The skies looked bland and Earth-like, and none of the alien life looked convincing or like the differences were at the kingdom level like they should be. They looked like procedurally generated mishmashes of Earth life with sunflower heads and so on, like it was designed by children rather than anyone who knows their biology and evodevo.
I believe it also has quasi-FTL travel which is very disappointing. IIRC, it specifically has Star Trek fantasy warp drives, which are practically impossible and require unobtainium among having other issues. Not very hard scifi to me, but more than it stretching my suspension of disbelief, I'm personally just not a fan of those and think they make for lame scifi. In my opinion, if you can travel that easily in the universe the story may as well have been fantasy with planes, since to travel effectively FTL takes away what's most interesting and unique about space travel and the challenges it creates, both mundane in terms of logistics and whatnot, but also more exotic such as time dilation at high speeds.
Despite my impression, the other reason you said makes it tempting to give it a shot. Definitely looks like I'll have to turn off any expectations of it following science or focusing on scientific imagination to enjoy it, though. The best hard scifi is usually written by scientists, but Beth seems like they have less than high school science educations, and the game and its story doesn't look focused on science.
