I would say it does in some way. The Xianzhou has a bunch of B-Plots going on that are off-shoots of 1.x - They are now enemies of Nanook because of Phantylia and Nanook is very central to a lot of the story. The Stellarons are apparently connected to him, so by extension the Trailblazer is (and our first Path was Destruction). Jingliu and Luocha are still having plans that are seemingly about killing an Aeon. And there is The Hunt vs. Abundance war. Lots of plot-threads thare are maybe only tangentially related to the "main-main" plot, but are imo still building up to something big, so I don't mind them.
So, to me, the stellaron is the core plot/mystery of the game. The other stuff happening with the factions and aeons are sort of world building and while they do contribute to the overall cosmology of the Star Rail universe, they are not directly telling the main story. I kind of understand that it's difficult to write a story for a live service game... you have to expanding the plot in new directions while simultaneously drip feeding the core story. I think the balance is off for Star Rail... I'm not even sure they actually moved the stellaron story forward at all in Penacony. I think live service stories should be written as finite arcs so that they can actually reach a conclusion instead of getting stretched indefinitely. In the case of Genshin, the main story is finding Lumine/Aether and resolving the history of Khaenri'ah. And even though it will be a 6-7 year long arc, it's fair to expect a resolution in or after Snezhnaya. And then, hopefully, if Genshin remains popular, they should start another proper story with the Traveler and maybe Paimon too. That's how I'd prefer things to happen anyway.
For the present discussion, I think sticking with the main story of a planet for a whole year is preferable to these side mission/filler patches which is why I'm glad that's what they're talking about for the next year.
Although for your "problem" in particular, there's really nothing stopping you from bee-lining the main story and doing exploration at your leisure afterwards. Iirc only Chasm is a main story progression-blocker.
While you're right about this, I didn't want to rush through Genshin just to catch up to the main story. As a general rule, I like to do the main and side quests of an RPG. In the case of Genshin, it is also worthwhile to do other things like exploration, oculus collection, reputation and so on. Mondstadt, I reached 100% region completion with something like 90%+ for Dragonspine. In Liyue I did all the quests and oculus collection but left exploration at around 60% because it was just too much. In Inazuma, I did quests and oculus collection but left exploration and decided to skip Enkanomiya and come back to it at some point in the future. Now in Sumeru I've done the archon quests but not all the world quests, and I'm thinking of skipping the oculus collection and exploration. Even after this I'll have all of Fontaine to go through and I'll probably skip Chenyu Vale to reach Natlan. I'm not a completionist by any stretch but you can see I'm playing each region less and less just to be able to catch up and I'm not really liking that either. I'm not playing the way I'd like to play and also continuously falling behind the relentless pace at which new content appears. So yea, it's a "problem" as you mentioned but I also don't want to just skip over a ton of stuff only to catch up to the story.
I think Zenless also does a good job with it's story. It has a more character-driven, lower-stakes, slice-of-live vibe that might feel like stuff is just "filler", but 1.4 was a phenominal "season finale" that basically brought everything together. Will have to be seen how things continue now though, but for now they have my trust after 1.4.
This really is one of the best parts of ZZZ. Low intensity, low stakes storytelling without some grand overarching threat in the story. That said, even here, I believe the origin story of our protagonists is in fact the main mystery so far and I hope they're going to address it. Literally everyone has said that 1.4 was a fantastic patch so I'm actually very tempted to come back and see what happened but again, I'm at least 2 patches behind in the story. It's always daunting to think how much time you'll have to play just to catch up with everything.