They mentioned you can go to a settlement on Mars, so you can visit the Sol system, but Earth hasn’t been mentioned. Either it’s off-limits, like in Elite Dangerous where you need a permit to visit, or it’s heavily altered, perhaps by nuclear war or climate change so they don’t have to recreate all of Earth, or they actually have recreated all of Earth.
Yeah you can land anywhere on earth but there isn’t much going on, just a big desert.
Details are in the game story.
There are things to find. Old structures and such. But they are pretty rare and the planet is huge.
I just find it neat to have a base roughly around the same part of the planet as I actually live. Shame it doesn’t seem to actually use real heightmap data for anything other than the texture of the planet when in orbit.