It's hard for me to really invest myself in how the SMs of F4 ought to look when I can't get over the far more basic problem that they shouldn't have been in F4 at all. I can't stand how Bethesda keeps rehashing elements of prior games in the series like this. SMs were a thing that happened once. Once. A particularly demented mind discovered how to create them, he had the idea of using them to overrun the world, he armed them using the weapons at the military base where they were created, etc. All of this wasn't just some fluke that could happen anywhere there was FEV. It was a unique problem to that corner of the world, and while there are still some lingering aftereffects, as we saw in F2 and NV, that situation is largely resolved. It's over. Time for the series to move on. But no, Bethesda had to look at that and go, "Okay, I guess this is the blueprint for the series. SMs are part and parcel of the Fallout series - anywhere we set a game, there needs to be lots of them for the player to kill."
Same thing applies to the player being a vault-dweller who's new to the post-apocalyptic world. It was a thing that happened once, in the first game of the series, and now Bethesda thinks that every game in the series needs to start like that.