One of the worst parts about Stalker 2 is the traversal, compared to the previous games you spend a shit ton of more time travelling and not actually doing anything else. Whereas you would spend a couple minutes between your destinations previously you can now spend dozens. This alongside most of the map being composed of locations with no content and just generic loot made the game way less worthwhile and fun to play.
The reason for this is a fine mix of needless open-world, soybaiting and GSC's retarded decisions.
The old games had transitions from area to area, which made the map way bigger while also skipping large parts of empty land
This of course could still be made well in an open world setting if they compacted the locations together. GSC however decided that the map needs to be accurate to real life, for some fucking reason.
This led to Stalker 2 devs doing that Spongebob image where he looks at both pages of a book, but they took the bad traits of all the options.
They made the map as close to reality as possible which fucked over half of the lore, but that's a topic for a different time, and also made the map fucking COLOSSAL, while also removing the feature of transitions. Yet despite all this, they kept the fucking transition paths. One example is the road leading from garbage to Rostok, which is the exact same as in the trilogy - long, empty, and enclosed by cliffs from both sides. The only reason it still exists is soybait.
The fast travel system is completely castrated too. The guides are sparse, and during the course of the game you can lose access to quite a few of them. If you decide to go against Ward, you will remove
any option of fast-travelling to the south-west part of the map. Do note that the nearest fast travel point in this case is Zalissya,which is separated from the south-west part by an uncrossable river, requiring another taxing detour. Additionally there will be no trade outposts in that part of the map - Ward base will be obviously unaccessible and so will Malachite's.
You can't even use the small Loner outpost next to the Ward base. It's doors get locked if you're in combat, and it just so happens that there is an invincible, aimbotting and wallhacking guard at the Ward base entrance which can spot you from around 100 meters away even though a building, immediately putting you in combat.
So yeah, the map is FUBAR and it's too late to fix it.