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Tactical shooters are built around a tension/release loop between the positioning and the shooting. You are running your own strategy with imperfect information about how to preempt the enemy. Collecting more information narrows the possibility space, until one of you gets the payoff in the form of a head appearing under your crosshair.
One extreme form is the extraction shooter, where 95% of the gameplay is routine. Covert maneuvering, inventory management, situational awareness. The whole time, though, you're supposed to be predicting what the other players are up to while you're preoccupied. Then you get a payoff in the form of climactic fights or narrow escapes. I'm sure @self_made_human has said more on the subject.
MOBAs occupy a different space, but they've still got tension/release. The routine activity (farming) gives way to deliberate maneuvers (ganks, pushes) give way to a big payoff (teamfights). You get some control over the transitions between steps if you correctly assess relative strengths, player intents, and so on.
All this without mentioning the social aspect. Monkey brain shows dominance. Monkey brain impress friends. Graah.
Searching my username alongside "Tarkov" will turn up a fairly unflattering paper trail re: my relationship with the genre. Reading it in chronological order resembles the journal of somebody trying to quit caffeine while living above a coffee shop. I'm not quite sure how I managed it, in the end.
This gets at something hard to convey to people who haven't logged the hours. Hardcore extraction shooters share a structural feature with actual combat, or at least with everything I've read about actual combat: long flat plateaus of tedium, occasionally interrupted by short bursts of unfiltered terror. Your life isn't, strictly speaking, at risk, although I suspect if somebody pulled the actuarial tables on long-term Tarkov players we'd find some interesting blood pressure data. But the stakes are higher than in any comparable genre. A single death can wipe out days of progress. Every kill you score has cost somebody, somewhere, an evening they aren't getting back.
The thing that makes this fun (where "fun" is being used in roughly the same sense that ultramarathons are fun, or possibly in the sense that some hobbies are genuinely satisfying to participants and indistinguishable from torture to onlookers, Type 3 fun to be specific) is that death turns out to be effective pedagogy. And not only for the people writing the obituary. You absorb caution and prudence almost involuntarily, and your gut, given enough thousands of hours, becomes something pretty close to a calibrated instrument. You look at a dozen doors, a hundred bushes, and a few broken windows, and you just know that something ain't quite right.
There's also a gameplay premium on what military types call violence-of-action. Once the rounds are close enough to part your hair, you discover that holding still is functionally identical to dying. The best fights play out like choreography: two people of roughly comparable skill trying to outshoot and outguess each other in the span of about eight seconds.
And the decision tree branches forever. Is your magazine still good for another burst, or did you spend most of it on the last guy? Do you loot the body now, or wait in case his teammates are about to round the corner? Do you chuck a grenade into the room where you're pretty sure somebody is camping? Do you, in the immortal words, feel lucky, punk?
Then there's the social layer, and like most things, the game is better with friends, or with acquaintances who rapidly end up becoming your friend. Do you trust the new player you've been mentoring to actually watch your six? Do you accept, in advance, that he probably won't, and forgive him in advance because you remember being him? Do you risk your own kit recovering your dead teammate's gear so the insurance payout works out in his favor? There is no single right answer to any of these. The game just keeps teaching you that some answers are better than others, and you'd better figure out which is which, fast.
And then sometimes you do everything correctly and you still get domed by some guy in a bush three hundred meters away. War is, as the saying goes, heck. I don't play Tarkov anymore, although the reason has more to do with BSG's ongoing mismanagement of the property than with the underlying design, which is still genuinely unlike anything else on the market (except maybe Gray Zone Warfare, which I'm trying to get into). Whatever else you can say about it, nobody else is making this game. It's a shame BSG is unmaking their game. One step forward, two steps back, toes inside their own ass. I'm too old to deal with that nonsense.
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So the payoff of all the waiting around is that you finally get to play the game.
Waiting around to play the game isn't fun. It's barely tolerable with friends, and that's more in the suffering-through-something-someone-else-enjoys sense than the actually-engaging-for-player sense.
The difference between an extraction simulator and similar open world games where there's a similar amount of walking (or waiting) is that, for the latter, playing the game is more of an incidental (as in, there's more to look at/more to gather, because you're building towards something else- there's no building or measure of permanence in any of these other games).
Tarkov is even worse about that, because you spend a limited resource to have a higher chance of surviving/accumulating further resource, and if you die having done that you're now at a further disadvantage when it comes to playing the game. So the chance you'll actually have any fun in a round is now distributed over several rounds/hours, not just one. And that's not counting the cycle resets that do this anyway.
It's not a game; it's boring, tedious, work to have a chance of making it to the fun part.
The waiting part is a different game; a sneaking game with regards to avoiding unecessary fights with NPCs (or players if you're not looking for a fight that day). There's also the hunting game mechanics; if you're looking to kill some players, stopping, listening for distant firefights, doors, exfils, running... so that you can create as accurate a picture of what is happening before you engage is another kind of gameplay that is enjoyable in its own right, for some people at least.
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