In all games I've worked on nav meshes have been used. They are definitely the goto solution for NPC movement. However, I did work on a number of popular open

In all games I've worked on nav meshes have been used. They are definitely the goto solution for NPC movement. However, I did work on a number of popular open world racing games where a lot of NPCs were travelling across the map, often where no player was nearby. For these, as well as for visualization of travel routes on the map, we used a graph of the road network and A* with some simple modifications such as adding edges from the start and end point to the nearest points on the road network.