Really? Skyrim, the game where if you place an apple in a bucket on a guy's counter and go do 200 hours of quests and come back... the apple is still there. That's not a persistent world? That's pretty much the only point of that engine.

Granted, player agency in Skyrim is pushed way down compared to earlier TES titles but you can still affect the game world by choosing quests, choosing sides, Hell, Morrowind allowed you to kill a main questline quest-giver, ruin the prophecy, keep playing, and still fulfill the main storyline.