The "get to some location" part was better in GTA IV. Not only was the dialogue more interesting, there were two sets of dialogue for every mission, so if you falied and had to do the "get to location" part again, you got a whole different set of dialogues. But it seems noone ever noticed and there are almost no mentions of it on the internet.
That's possible that it was discussed back then, but there are only few ressources (like youtube videos comparing the dialogues) nowadays event mentioning that.
I don't think GTA V does that, driving to missions works differently, there is less dialogue on the way and the "check point" is closer to the actual mission and I even tried to provoke different dialogues by failing missions because I wanted to hear alternate dialogue.
Game journalism was in a vastly different place then than it is now, I would not use modern appearances as indicative of what people thought at the time
For example, most reviews were written in text, not some awful tuber vid
