Maybe, but to me it's voice chat + matchmaking.
I used to play on a few Day of Defeat: Source servers, and I met a ton of great online friends there. That's because they were dedicated and moderated servers that kicked and banned people for being assholes, in or out of voice chat.
But... If you're confident that you're never going to see the people in your match again, it's way easier to be assholes to them.
While I do agree, there are steps that NMS could have done to allow people to keep their favorite settlements/planets. They could:
Only apply the new planet generation to undiscovered/new planets
Keep the old generation in a different "dimension" and allow players to view older dimensions
Only apply the new generation to planets that haven't had visitors/people there for X time.
Among other things. It's not an impossible problem, but it definitely would require quite a bit of extra work for Hello Games.