there are two voices with which modern bethesda most often carries its world, and I do include ZOS in that umbrella: everyone is either stupid or right
there is nobody who is smart but wrong, because sooner or later, they have to be proven mistaken, and then they are either stupid or become right. there is an assumption inherent that it is a sign of personal failure on the part of someone who lives in the world to know how it works, and of course, to care about all of it
a lot of the charm of the writing in morrowind is that people care about themselves a lot. they exist in their own heads regardless of whether they're right and wrong, and just as often, someone (or even a whole place!) exists in a state of passively being aware that a broader understanding of reality is not something they particularly care about. the economics of an egg mine matter a lot more to the owner of an egg mine than they do to its employees, and while they're not exactly taking pride in the narrow scope of their world, they're caring about things that matter in their lives, as people do. this places their voices firmly within their own skull, where they might believably be
worldbuilding is itself a voice, because the world as perceived by the audience is itself a camera-character, and it is not one which is exempt from this rule
at risk of being curmudgeonly, the information you choose to reveal is what draws the scope of someone's world, and the higher you raise that, the less authentic the world becomes. bethesda's conception of this voice indicates a preference for this stupid or right handling of reality
information may be revealed from higher places than anyone would ever have access to (or care to check) simply because someone outside of the game might have questions about it, and because something cannot exist without having a full form below the water, there is an assumption that player theories are either stupid or right, and so it's just a matter of time before the mystery is solved, and so the carrot on the stick offered is "see if you were right"
it's not perfectly generic advice, but if you want to maintain a believable atmosphere-forward world, a decent starting point is to only elaborate on elements of it that someone inside of the world would care about, and if you find yourself contriving someone to care about it because you know the player does, you've cracked the sky open, for money-better and art-worse
sometimes the person who cares IS the player character! but you become less normal the further you walk from what the average person cares about, and that distance is poisonous to the artistic illusion of an inhabited world
