I dunno if they changed it, but when it released X rebirth forced you to get in those interiors for no reasons whatsoever. Want to trade anything ? Need to dock because future people don't have phones. Want to hire people for your ship ? Need to dock. Also, some unique items forced you to dock and crawl around looking for them.
And then you had like 3 different faces for NPCs, leading to an invasion of grandma clones.
In X4 it's seamlessly integrated. When you dock in a station the door open, you can go outside or not. You can use the com or go on foot. Whatever. Stuff like changing ships need you to walk though, until you have the teleporter.
Fun fact, X rebirth was so poorly received at the time, it was the most downrated game on steam and the amount of refund forced them to change their global policy. See, at the time refund where on a case by case basis, and you had to contact support for it. Eventually they auto granted refund for X rebirth to alleviate the overload. A few weeks later they made the system we have now (auto refund for less than 2h played and less than 2weeks after purchase), after people who had their refund refused contacted the EU to intervene.
Yet they survived, learned and made X4, a good game on its own.
Kinda like NMS.
Maybe Fdev will pull the same with Odyssey. I have my doubts, but still, it's possible.