I skipped most of the stuff my self, but looking at the wiki, FDev put a lot of content for players to find. And they did, including tons of recorded messages and stories over the years.
Don't put blame on them if you don't partisipate. This is not like other MMORPG's wher they hold us by hand and tell us what to do and how, and which reward you will get in return.
This are actual adventures.
The average player simply doesn't have the resources or time to find things like a vocal minority did.
Excuse me for wanting to access the content without having to run audio analysis on trailers.
That, in my opinion, is bad design.
If you want to call it hand-holding, then it's hand-holding. I don't care.
I can assure you though, there's no hand-holding in the MMOs I play. Only way to learn mechanics is to play the game, run dungeons, etc.
Only difference is, the devs don't try and make accessing those contents ridiculously obtuse.
FD does space-flight well. No doubt about it. But the whole locking the story to the 1% thing? It's dumb in my book.