You’re hung up on the term fetch quest. Fine. The game doesn’t have a single “fetch quest”. That aside, the map is primarily full of icons (missions, quests, adventures, whatever) that require you to search for, seek, investigate, find, collectibles, skins, audio logs, and NPCs. These aforementioned activities hold no real bearing on the campaign story itself and do not contain and “side story” elements that would add to the campaign/story experience.
TLDR: the story is flames, everything else is a missed opportunity and feels like a chore. The game would have been made even better as a linear game instead of an empty map of optional collectibles. As a single player experience it being open world makes quick diversions feel tedious. I would imagine as a co-op experience those optional quests,adventures,missions,icons blah blah would be much more fun to go after.
The last of us doesn’t get the same criticism from me because it’s linear. There aren’t huge empty spaces between core missions full of optional quests. A better comparison would be ghost of Tsushima which has a similar open world structure except many of the side activities have their own story elements. Sure they have cosmetic missions, but they also have a ton of side story content that makes the overall world feel more immersive.
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