Minecraft is a great example of what the survival genre looks like at its peak. Everything you do serves to help you accomplish your next goal, all the way to the final goal of beating the Ender Dragon. And then there are optional sub-goals you can set for yourself, like doing alchemy, making a mob farm, getting a Heart of the Ocean, getting an Elytra, beating a raid, finding treasures, automating your own production. All contributes directly towards making you survive better.

In NMS you reach the goal of surviving when you first unlock your ship. Once it's fully repaired you embark on a fetch quest to walk and fly around gathering materials to craft the mystical orbs that mark the completion of the story, stopping once in a while to gather fuel for your ship, materials to fly to new kinds of star systems, and to talk to NPCs for some lore. But it's not like the gathering of these materials really takes effort. There's no spelunking, or braving a netherworld, or fighting back poisonous spiders while charting out old ruins. The most you get is that you need to craft a more powerful laser, and a special glove to collect some special resources that are, in fact, so abundant as to make gathering them no challenge at all. And everything else that's in the game just exists on the side, optional distractions that don't feed into the core loop. The only things that really affect your main game loop would be freighters, because they give you a bigger inventory, and this most recent update that adds mobile bases.

Minecraft also has a benefit that, when you run out of things to do, when you've beaten the dragon, collected everything, built your monuments, and done all that over and over until you're bored, the game enables limitless new experiences through being so very customizable. Mods that turn the game into Factorio, or Diablo, or DayZ, or change how the world generates or how it all functions on the most basic level. Or if mods aren't your thing you can join a server, and play with other people in all kinds of minigames. Standard SMP, or PvP stuff, or custom-coded challenges, what have you. NMS doesn't have any of that, and while it does have multiplayer that doesn't really change anything of the core gameplay. It's still just "fly around and gather things," but this time with another person along for the ride.