I always felt like Elite Dangerous kind of got caught up in its own hype. Like sure you're simulating this huge galaxy, and everything is very to-scale, and it's an MMO, and there's a lot of things you can hypothetically do.

But then you actually play it and you're just doing some combination of meandering, dogfighting, or mining. Forever.

The best space sim games, in order of "most sim" to "most 4k," are Starsector, Stellaris, and Endless Space 2.