I really enjoyed my first playthrough, well after launch. I hadn't played an ES game before so I got to enjoy a lot of things for the first time. Especially the worldbuilding. Towers and so on.

I also didn't know you could fast travel on my first playthrough and in retrospect I think that made it better. Quests were more organic in that it was annoying to go all around the map, so I'd clear regions more than with fast travel. I also encountered more random-ish events on the road and they were more novel because basically none of them came from chasing down quest markers. Walking into and between areas also created a sense of scale and made it easier to appreciate the characters of different regions.

On that playthrough I ended up as a two-handed mace Nord, real basic B hours, and it was very fun to go through a good set of side quests, some secondary storylines, and the main questline.

Subsequent playthroughs were nowhere near as good and I think I only completed the main questline on one of them. I got small reminders of the fun of the first playthrough but mostly felt the grind. And discovering fast travel, in retrospect, sucked a lot of fun out of it. I did resurrect my first character's saves to play the expansions and preferred the one that takes you to the island up north.

I'd say it was a pretty decent game for its time that benefitted heavily from the worldbuilding of Morrowind, some nice vibes (nighttime sky and music), and hype. Oh, and being a dummy that didn't know how to fast travel.

PS there are thousands of bland Skyrim listicle videos on Youtube that are great for mild insomnia. Nothing more somnorific than a nerd talking about the top 10 most drunk things about skyrim vampires or whatever.