Sorry, what ? In what world ?
The NPC pop in is really the only issue Shenmue 3 has in terms of UE4 issues.
Any other 'issues' fall under art style approach (like the odd use of them hiring two different art designers who had conflicting art styles)
That aside, I've obviously played both games as many here have; and the background textures in Shenmue 3 do not suffer the same low poly low texture stream issue FF VIIR does.
I even did a funny screenshot comparison of Shenmue 3's toilet bowl texture vs FF VII R's (Shinra HQ bathroom), and Shenmue 3's toilet was much more detailed.
Also
The food and items around the food in Shenmue 3 are also overall in much higher detail than FF VII R's.
I also did side by side comparisons. FF VIIR's not even on par with Shenmue 3's in that regard.
Of course we know in Shenmue 3 there is far less clone NPCs but thats the nature of the series.
Whereas of course with FF VIIR, there are clone NPCs everywhere. I noticed one looked like the actress Ruby Rose lol.
And then theres the environment textures yeah; the streaming/loading issues with FF VIIR are terrible. Mostly in the slums.
Some textures literally looked like they came out of a PS1 game it was so bad.
I recall Aerith's house some of the kitchen items looks like PS1 items texture wise.
I even recall a Sector 7 slum shop keeper's store and his shops textures would not load at all fully; would be completely blurry.
Reminded me of last gen's Alpha Protocol rpg game by SEGA which also had texture loading problems and ran on UE3.
Which was odd to me seeing as how FF VIIR wasnt an open world game and its size was pretty much the same size as Shenmue 3 (pushing 100gb)
I did notice though that these issues werent prevalent in the first bombing mission and right after it when the it exploded and you were running from Shinra troops in the streets at night. Not sure why that was; maybe more closed in areas lead to less streaming issues? Noticed the same improvement later on after chapter 15 when you went inside Shinra HQ: even the Shinra cafeteria food textures got a major quality boost all of a sudden.
They even used a static skybox effect for when you were on the plate tower looking down at the slums. Dunno what their aim was with that. PS1 static FMV nostalgic? No clue.
Where FF VIIR shines is its main character models, particle effects, and animation.
But even Days Gone, which also runs on UE4, and was a true open world game, also suffered early on with streaming texture issues but they had an early patch which actually sorted all that out.