Seems kind of like the game is just suffering from reactionaries, but I definitely don’t put that much stock in critic reviews these days either.
I would guess that any platform-exclusive game is going to have some level of that, just because you’ve got fans of Platform A and fans of Platform B. And Starfield was purchased by Microsoft specifically to have an X-Box (well, and PC) exclusive, so…
Go back to the 1980s, and it was “Mario sucks” or “Sonic sucks”.
I play games almost entirely on the PC, so the Starfield acquisition (as well as the other recent acquisitions by Microsoft or Sony or whoever that have been driving the antitrust concerns) haven’t really been on my radar, but if I had a popular game coming out on my platform and then someone paid to ensure that I didn’t get it, I’d be kind of irked.
I did use a Mac, many years back, and I remember being annoyed when Bungie – then a major game developer for the Macintosh, in an era when the Mac wasn’t getting a lot of games – was purchased by Microsoft in 2000. Halo did come out for the Mac, but Halo 2 didn’t, and I imagine that a lot of people who were on the Mac then were probably pretty unhappy about that.