It can't be THAT far off
Everyone is talking about that interview where Todd says that TES6 is a "long way off" which duh, it's definitely not releasing on top of GTA6 next year. But he also says near the end of the interview that they just did a 3-hour playtest of the game. So it's definitely well beyond the conceptual stages and that seems hefty for even a vertical slice. Presumably you'd have to be well into level production with at least partially finished/recognizable assets to justify that amount of playtime. I doubt anyone's showing off graybox shit to the executives for 3 hours.