I think fast travel has done some bad stuff for video game design
We can’t get rid of it because players have become so impatient, but every open world video game improves a lot when you actually do take the time to walk from A to B. I noticed this primarily with Skyrim, that the despite how ugly the game is it does have decent atmosphere and enough random events that only crop up during travel in the wild, and games with even better environments and atmosphere are only better.
Even if there isn’t much in the way of random events I think just that feeling of travelling along roads makes the experience so much better.
Fallout 1 and 2 kinda worked around this by having “fast travel” work across the map and periodically throw you into random encounters as your dotted line progressed.
I’ve used fast travel mods in STALKER and it really fowls up the gameplay, since the core of Stalking as a thing is to fucking crawl from point A to point B
For this reason, i feel like the Haruspicus, the Bachelor and the Devotress are technically stalkers.
Zelda BotW has a sort of fast travel system in which you teleport to fixed points in the map, but to do so you have to actually explore and find them, and its entirely up to you if you want to use them.
It also gives you the ability to capture and tame horses for faster travel, which once registered can be left abandoned at random places and then summoned in ranches all over the map, but again, you get to choose if you use them or not.
And the game constantly encourages travelling by foot with secrets, puzzles and random events like falling stars and flying dragons you can shoot an arrow at to get a very useful scale from them.
So if you want to chill and explore, you can, if you want to get from X to Y fast but still keep the ability to stop and look around, you can, and if you just want to move the story forward, that’s what the teleport system is for!
And since roads are optional too, you can just scale that mountain and get to your objective as you seem fit, although that usually means facing extreme weather or powerful monster encounters.
Fast travel is the soul-sucking compromise between gamers just wanting levels in a linear narrative and developers insisting on OPEN WORLD OPEN WORLD OPEN WORLD.
Witcher 3 had a pretty good fast travel system, where you could only fast travel at a road mark.