You're evidently don't belong to the CRPGs' target player base :)
The basic idea of CRPGs is to give you an avatar that is as different or as similar to you personally as you want and let you experience the avatar's interactions with the world they live in. It might seem that it's currently the case for 90% of the games, but please remember that early CRPGs competed with Pong, Pacman, and Asteroids, not Quake. You'd have a hard time identifying yourself with a paddle or imagining spending your entire life in a maze being chased by ghosts. You would have a much easier time with an Elven archer roaming Middle-Earth, especially if you've read and memorized the Trilogy by heart.
From that basic premise, I'd roughly distinguish two main ways of realizing it: via numbers or words.
By numbers, I mean a situation where your avatar can be described as a bunch of numbers, as is the world, and you're supposed to find your own meaning in those numbers. Which ones matter to you, which you don't care about, or which represent an ability to do things you care about. You are then given an array of activities that both require the numbers to be aligned in a particular way and allow you to improve the numbers for you.
By words, I mean a situation where your avatar is presented to you via description. The numerical values that underpin the avatar identity and the shape of the world are still there, but you experience them only indirectly, through the description of the environment, your avatar actions, and their consequences.
There are not many "pure" realizations of either way because, taken to the extreme, the number case turns into an Excel sheet with all column and row names garbled, while words simply become a book or novel.
Of additional note is the issue of effort on the game creator's part. You generally can't procedurally generate descriptions above a certain length, especially not if you want the descriptions to be meaningful, not only readable. You'd need AGI for that. Procedurally generated content is crucial because it allows you to lengthen the time the game is played. You can read a good fantasy novel in a few days, while you can easily lose 200 hours to a single CRPG.
Back to exploring the wilderness. Morrowind leaned towards the numbers-based gameplay if my memory serves me right. You were required to perform an action repeatedly to improve your skill in that action. Take jumping, for example. I remember locking the spacebar in a depressed position on long treks between cities because jumping raised your strength. On the other hand, it did have a lot of hand-crafted, meaningful locations that you would visit multiple times. It had a few different plotlines you could follow and some memorable NPCs and you were given quite a lot of freedom in how you wanted to interact with the world. These are all features closer to the words-based gameplay. Still, most of the game consisted of repetitive, although more tactical than dexterity-based combat in the wilderness or dungeons.
Some people have a stronger preference for one gameplay style, and for them, Morrowind found a perfect balance. Relatively high freedom in what you could do, the plot, and the NPCs who sometimes even spoke more than a few words, were enough to give them a plausible reason to go and have real fun... By killing skeletons for 5 hours, nearly dying for 4h 50m, then getting a level-up, a corresponding dopamine rush, and going on a skeleton-killing spree in the last 9 minutes. You'd probably die to the boss lich in the last minute, allowing you to rage-quit the game and go back to beating skeletons again the next day.
Is it fun? Yes. It's one of the kinds of fun CRPGs are designed to give you. Since the early days - and I mean the times of ADVENT[ure] and Zork - the CRPGs evolved tens of subgenres, took advantage of the progress in hardware and in the general inflation of game makers' budgets, enlarging the scope, but the basic idea is still the same. To give players either: enough of the descriptions to make grinding meaningful or enough grinding not to frustrate them into not finishing the story.
One note: obviously, at some point nearly all CRPGs became graphical and later multi-media, one way or the other. That didn't, and still doesn't, change much. You can present the description of the world with words alone, with words and images, words and animation, images alone, images and music alone, and so on. What's important is that you are describing a world, an avatar and its actions within that world.
Another note: multi-player changes things drastically in the case of CRPGs, especially if it is not co-operative or is "massive". The metaphor is still the same, but the cost-benefit ratio of various game features is completely unlike the single-player version. MUDs were early multi-player CRPGs evolved as a cross between BBS and IRC, and their rise and eventual brutal demise under the weight of op-wars and spam a warning widely heard by CRPG makers. The MUDs persisted, barely clinging to existence in some niches, and later gave us MMORPGs, which are also completely different from single-player (or 1-4 people coop, later on) games. So I don't think talking about WoW is very relevant to the topic, ie. Morrowind.