very nice review i see we both flew the same ship at some point lol:
except mine was a red variant.

I believe the pop-ins are CPU based, back on my i5-3450 i noticed a lot of this as well, but now on my i5-9600k everything loads in nicely. this game never really had "actual" pop-ins though because it uses a fade-in technique for all the objects, making it slightly more subtle than just things spawning in, im not sure how this is handled on ps4, from what i read you're playing on one?

I agree with the lack of diversity, Planets seem to still only contain 3 different biome's, the landscape, the caves, and the underwater biome. so if you've seen these 3, you've seen the entire world.
My biggest concern however was that there's too much progression tied to units, and there's too many shortcuts to skip all that "progression", be it farming and creating expensive trade items, activated indium miner setups, or just straight up breaking the market with ionised cobalt. I was able to jump from C class ships and multitools, straight to A-S class with max slots, which i later regret because this immediately puts you in what you could consider endgame with nothing left to work for. its tough finding a good balance between speed and progression, and this game got it wrong on that department. I think this game would be more fun if i sticked purely to selling found items only and maybe even ignored the entire left section of every space station, since everything they offer, can also be found on planets.