the Wasteland hadn’t changed at all despite it now being centuries since the bombs fell

That's one of the things that annoys me about Fallout: it's just so unrealistically barren. I mean, we have real-life examples in places like Hiroshima and Chernobyl, and the reality is that pretty damn quickly after the bombs, they'll be just as green again as normal. Don't get me wrong, obviously there should still be mutated creatures and ruins and stuff, but it should all be super-overgrown, too.

Not to mention, centuries is plenty of time for civilization to at least clean up a lot of the debris and such, and even make decent progress recovering. Realistically, the state of the world in Fallout is more appropriate for a setting a decade or less after the war.

As far as depictions of life after nuclear war goes, I wish we could have a game more like Alas, Babylon.