It's not a problem of going too far. It's a problem of not being implemented well. For instance most of the stuff in RDR2 that is tedious could easily be done in a way that is engaging and interesting. It's largely an issue of the developers either not caring to do that or intentionally making it tedious because they think that's realistic. It's probably kind of inevitable when you make games that are this big. There are too many cooks in the kitchen, and/or the project leads have too much on their plates as individuals to really work well together, or it's just too ambitious and the different elements have some fundamental tension that's not resolved. That doesn't make the games bad necessarily, but it does make the whole thing messier and gets in its own way. With a lot of games "realism" is mostly code for "feature creep" where they keep adding things without fleshing them out enough to make them interesting or worthwhile.
You can do something as basic as include a rhythm element to repetitive tasks and make them engaging. Like when Arthur is carving the X's into his bullets, instead of making it slow as fuck with a large delay between each input, you can require 2 or 3 button presses in a sequence that if you time them right will make the animation play faster. Gears of War integrated that kind of rhythm into the gunplay with active reloads back in 2006. RDR1 had something a bit like this as well, where you could sprint indefinitely without losing stamina if you timed pressing the sprint button to John's footsteps. I tried that in RDR2 and it never seemed to work, so the game actually regressed on this point. But you could apply this design principle to a lot of the tedious tasks where currently you just press a button occasionally to trigger a new animation. It stands out particularly against the way that single-action guns require you to press the trigger twice - once to cock and again to fire.
The other thing you can do is multitask. Idk why this seems to be such an issue but if you really do want to be realistic, the characters (PC or NPC) should be able to multitask. While you are doing tedious work you should also be able to have conversations, tell stories, sing, etc. The recend God of War games did this correctly, so there's an excuse for characters to drop exposition and backstory and so that the traveling sections don't get tedious. Closest you get to this in RDR2 is conversations on horseback, which is stagnant from RDR1.
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