This is just another gross exaggeration and simply not true. As I mentioned I play on Insane Difficulty and was in no way forced one way or the other on my progression. I chose to look for a city early to be in a better spot for trader quest variety and this caused me to progress much quicker both in my skills but also gamestage and I can assure you even with that boosted gamestage there was certainly not radiated zombies on day 8 let alone only a couple of ferals.
Reading through this thread let me know that a lot of people are bad at the game, bad at reading or both. As a few scholars pointed out the game does in fact let you know what perks increase the chances for Forge Ahead magazines. Could this have been easier to find in the text? Sure, but it does exist. I'm also not here to flat out defend the new magazine progression system. It is a massive step in the right direction and could be improved with some balancing but overall it functions correctly. With that being said I can't think of a single reason why LBD isn't a better way of doing the exact same thing especially since this form does exactly what people were worried about which is it completely screws over the players who just wanna sit around mining and building. Also Roland's response was *chef's kiss*
My personal experience with this system so far was taking a slower approach to the progression admittedly because I didn't bother reading the perks/magazine pages prior to just jumping into the skills I felt like playing due to being on Insane difficulty. To me my combat and survival perks felt more necessary than workstations and vehicles. With that being sad I still managed to get them relatively quick once I decided I needed them without putting points into Advanced Engineering or Lockpicking. I did enough trader quests to get a bicycle and rode around town to town looting every mailbox, newspaper stand and broken workstation I could find. I never felt gatekept on getting what I wanted throughout my playthrough as you can repeat tier 1 quests for book bundles also or tier 2 quests for more than enough forged steel to get through the early game.