Lore cannot be dumped upon the audience because it isn't what people engage with stories for.

I am not suggesting lore dumping, I'm suggesting keeping the the backdrop consistent with what was established so far. The show is clearly fine with the audience having questions, but none of the questions seem to point to having answers that tie into the history of the region. The history that the showrunners have written, perhaps.

Fallout is interesting for a visual medium because of how much exploration there is. No need to exposit or loredump, the characters can slowly find out the regional story as they go along. Which they do, but again - I think the end of the NCR is a bit less of a foreshadowed ending to a failing state and more "they were a big settlement and got nuked outta nowhere." Which, as you said, is kinda due to the nature of it being a show. But if you have to write off a major player in the region out mostly offscreen just to make the region fit, why not just pick a new region?

Having a deeper reference to One For My Baby than Cooper misremembering Carla's name and how long ago she was there wouldn't have been worth it for people who didn't play New Vegas.

I'm not suggesting a deeper reference or fanservice, I'm suggesting moving the shot outside the motel, which would remove the inconsistencies with location. And also, by having it outside the motel, the shot itself would reference the quest more. But that was not the goal of my suggestion.

Not seeing as many signs of it being rebuilt in the show makes sense if most people lived in smaller population centers for safety and many of them fell along with Shady Sands.

This is what I'm talking about. I would have liked to see evidence of these smaller population centers. In S1, we see barren desert, a few weirdos, a junktown, and nuked Shady Sands. Where are the farms, the outposts, the trading routes, or the tertiary settlements that would have naturally come from proximity to civilization? Only Shady Sands got nuked, where's all the other evidence for civilization? That's what I mean about no evidence of NCR. It's not that I wanted to see the faction I know, I just think there should be more evidence they existed in that region.

All that said, you've made quite a few points to the credit of the showrunners. They definitely don't have an easy job. You're absolutely right about the NCR territory being so massive that they could really show anything. But I still walk away thinking they maybe should have tread on new ground with this one.

Like, if they have to change so much to make it fit with their vision of the show, why not scale the show down and set it in an untouched region? The BoS factions in season 2 are already making me curious about the other parts of America, and they could show those areas with no fear of having to immediately adapt game lore.

I think it could have gained a lot from being centered just around The Ghoul and Lucy, honestly. When I sit and think about it, what turns me off of the show is that I feel it covers so much ground in a very surface-level way that raises more questions that it answers. Which is a problem that wouldn't be as prevalent if they had introduced the world concepts a little more slowly. And again, if they're fine with raising questions, why not do so in a way that showcases what happened in the region rather than easing the audience in with familiar albeit less related concepts?

On your note about how they can only do so much in 8 episodes, maybe they should have tried to work with less? Vaults, the wasteland, and ghouls for a bit, then maybe we run into the BoS. Pre-War flashbacks could have been introduced in Season 2 to flesh out Cooper more, since normally the Pre-War isn't heavily tied to the current wasteland in Fallout.

Idk, just my opinion. I'm not going to be hateful about it. But I do think that reactions such as mine could be avoided by not setting the show in previously trodden ground and using the plot to slowly build the idea of the region before the protagonists go there. And I think that's the crux of what I'm saying. You can do Fallout anywhere in America. Setting it in NCR territory shortly after New Vegas carries certain expectations with it, and I think the story they want to tell could flourish on its own and eventually play into the grander world were it set in an area with less obligation to convey history.