"Why does everything have to include shooting?"

The core problem is that for all the games look pretty in graphical terms, they've got major fundamental limitations in other ways.

One of the biggest is that you don't have hands. You have a laser pointer and perhaps even several dozen verbs for that laser pointer, but no hands. You can not pick up two things and do anything useful with them like you can in the real world. We can navigate around in 3D environments OK, but we have terrible interaction with them. Shooting is not the only thing that we have, but once you start seeing how limited the palette is, it becomes obvious that it's one of the more popular choices for a reason. In fact, even "melee" combat, under the hood, is generally "shooting" with a short range and an animation utterly disconnected from the underlying mechanics, hence things like the silliness of swinging your sword cleanly through someone's torso, something that in the real world would cleave them in twain, for zero damage. See also the absurdity of what passed for "speech" in games, as you attempt one of the most complicated activities there is by pointing with a laser pointer and grunting at what you want to "say".

You have no significant AI, so while No Man's Sky may have world upon world of fantastic-looking creatures, you can't do much of anything with them. You can't pet them. You can't raise them. You sure as hell can't communicate with them. What else are you going to do but point a laser pointer at them and grunt? And what other grunts are there that are of any value other than "Shoot"? The advantage shooting has is that both damage and death are relatively easy to make the target respond to. (Death in particular; once animated once you don't even have to animate on an ongoing basis.) Yes, you can come up with some other options, but they tend to peter out fast.

So, basically, you can't interact with the world very richly, and the world can't even correctly respond to those limited interactions. The graphics in modern games deceive you. By being nearly realistic they convince a good chunk of your brain that the game must be realistic. But the graphics are not representative of what's really going on; instead they are the bizarrely advanced spike sticking out above a landscape of much more modest design means. You've got games where the landscapes are almost photorealistic, but your ability to "speak" is walking up to a person and tapping them, which we saw 30+ years ago.

While I credit No Man's Sky for making it to release where many of its peers have had significant trouble making it that far, I've never been excited about it, because I've already played the "big universe of nothing much to do" game with things like Frontier: Elite II. Unfortunately, what procedural generation tends to produce is the stuff that was already easy in the first place. Writing a story that transcends the manifest limitations of the medium, or writing tight levels that require you to exploit certain mechanics, or creating creative puzzles based on a slowly-increasing set of mechanics, and so on, that's the hard stuff.

I'm not saying nobody will have fun, or that it's a bad game, or that you shouldn't try it. I'm saying that these limitations are pretty fundamental to the medium, and whenever somebody promises implicitly or explicitly to overcome them, you should be really skeptical. There's a long, long line of this sort of thing, Black and White, Spore, Fable, endless lines of procedurally generated games, things that even if the end result was not always "bad" are things that could not transcend the limitations of the medium.