This is what we call goalpost moving
You haven't gotten the ball anywhere near the goalposts yet, let alone close enough to make me consider moving them....
It's called "not convincing myself that the thing I want is true out of hype" or "waiting for evidence before making a judgement".
I linked a video where multiple alternate paths are shown, where stealth is attempted and eventually fails and the gameplay is different due to the failed stealth vs perfect stealth, just as it would have been different if they never even attempted stealth.
Finally, we're getting somewhere! And all it took was a tantrum and some petty insults for you to actually engage in a discussion.
To start with, having a stealth layer does not qualify a game as having emergent gameplay.
MGS1, for example, is not an emergent game- its guards and their patterns are all pre-defined and reset when you enter a room. The per-area problem space of perfect stealth / partial stealth / murder everyone is not deep enough for any additional layers of un-designed gameplay to 'emerge'.
Last of Us does have a more complex problem space by virtue of having larger more complex areas, distraction mechanics, the new scent tracking, and enemies needing to shout to alert eachother, but it's still a linear stealth game at its core. Enemies will still lose aggro and eventually go back to a patrol route, and you will either stealth perfectly, stealth partially, or kill everything. Where's the emergence?
TLOU wasn't a game with invisible barriers so all those clear alternate routes are going to be just that... alternate routes, if you seriously are going to argue a ND game is going to launch with invisible walls to block you from taking other paths that's just nuts.
Note that I didn't say 'invisible walls'.
Every game is going to have play boundaries of some sort, and Last of Us achieves them by building spaces that are large and convincing, then penning the player into a linear subset of them via smart art design.
Until we see footage that actually shows what those boundaries are in 2, we have no concrete point of reference for the game's scope and any assertions about it are speculation. Sure, the linear corridors might be wider and have more routes, but that still isn't going to rival a systems-driven open world game like DS.
You used as an example the footage of Norman Reedus in an open field being spotted by dudes he could have avoided on patrol... the whole video I linked is patrolling enemies you can sneak by, kill stealthily or outright murder loudly. There was even verticality in the choices of where to go in the TLOU footage, which is absent from the Death Stranding example you used.
The point isn't that the patrol could have been avoided, it's that the patrol wasn't guaranteed to be a factor in the first place.
Their route will be big enough - by virtue of being in an open world - that you might not even have encountered them. They might not even be on patrol based on factors like the time of day, or some event occurring elsewhere and taking their attention. The player might take some other route that subverts the patrol completely, or have actually caused the patrol to happen in the first place by causing an alert in an adjacent area.
It's that layering of possibilities and systems that defines emergent gameplay, not just taking an existing non-emergent model and adding complexity to it via extra mechanics and bigger levels.
