BioWare wouldn't approach Starfield's multitudes of systems on systems on systems even if their life depended on it. The 'old' Mass Effect trilogy isn't doing 1/5th of what Starfield is attempting to do. To me Mass Effect already shat on itself with ME3, and that game was itself its own poor man's version of both preceding games. I wouldn't use Mass Effect to try and downgrade the potential of Starfield.
However, with this said, Starfield is a Bethesda game; it won't be truly playable for various reasons at the very least 1 full year after release, and I would argue due to its sheer size and ambitious amount of content and systems will only exacerbate any problems we've known from Bethesda games in the past by a factor of maybe 5,677, give or take a few units. It's always the same story with their games, their potential is truly sky-high, but the execution is - for the most part - horrendous. The modding community will be required, as always.
I'll get it, eventually. Like I did most of their games at one point or another. But I would recommend patience and all their official patches for at least a few months worth before jumping in. Then around 4 to 6 months after release we should see the first signs of bugs-fixing mods, if not the Starfield Unofficial Patch (which might even be made a lot sooner than my estimations, we'll see). I've spent enough time in my life with their games, modding them, editing mods, I know what to expect. I started all the way back with Morrowind and really kicked in the whole modding scene with Oblivion and plunged in the ocean of mods with Skyrim for no less than around 4 years before I finally called it quits for my sanity's sake.