Some of the recent stuff seems to dispel that myth. As one of the Steamers said 'The density varies a lot depending on if there is merchants or time of day. Not a ton of NPC's in areas with less businesses. (similar to real life) ' which honestly ties in with what CDP have said all along (and the shopping district was pretty busy). The ebb and flow of activity in a city varies a lot. Not everywhere is going to be a hubbub of activity even during the day, and certainly less so at night. Still, people see what they want to see, and for a few folks who whatever reason, have been 'it ain't all that' about the game for years are looking for things to confirm their biases. Whereas everyone else is just counting down the days.
Everyone knows there's a big Day 1 patch coming which will largely overwrite/update a lot of things, and it's always the case that performance and polish are done towards the end of development. In large part because pretty much the bulk of the dev team will have been playing through the game themselves and highlighting issues that QA might have missed. However, that Day 1 patch is still yet to be implemented. Post patch I'd expect to see significant improvements.
With that said, will there be bugs at release? Sure in a game of this size and scope, there's always going to be things that slip through the cracks as with most titles (post-launch updates and support are a given with most games) but the idea that it's going to be this unplayable glitchfest seem rather exaggerated from what I've seen, read and heard.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt as you've only been here a few months but if you'd been in enough CP threads over the years here realise that there are a certain subset of people here who for whatever reason (CDP fucked their mum, Stole their lunch money or
TW3 beat out their favourite Game in GAFs GoTG poll ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) are deeply, deeply invested in rubbishing this game no matter what, and in truth
Reviews should come out on Monday, which should afford us all an insight into how the game plays and performs.