When their game-worlds are arguably the biggest game-worlds out there, a few bugs here and there are forgivable, for sure.
I've played many, many hours of Bethesda games. With the exception of a couple of game-ending glitches in Fallout 3, it has been pretty smooth sailing for me. Of course, there are the little things like clipping, dropped frame rates and the like, but with worlds of this size and scope, bugs are going to occur. It's impossible to test for every single little thing that every player might do to see if it causes an issue. In a linear game, it's easy as gamers have one path and one way to play.
It's why generally open world games get more leeway, as they tend to have so many random events, it's hard to test for everything. Even massive hit The Witcher 3 had a large number of bugs and such that had to be patched out and was rushed in some areas with how much they overhauled.
