I've been playing XCOM 2 for the first time these past months (masterpiece of a game btw) on Veteran Difficulty. I would blame this more on the game not giving you any meaningful options when there are no enemies nearby, because while fighting squads, I found overwatch pretty balanced, especially in the later stages, where enemies can straight up just fire an explosion at you and disable overwatch from all your units.
It's just that when you aren't fighting any squads currently... you kinda go through a cycle of "Walk a bit > Overwatch > End Turn" until something happens, because if you go even a tile too far, there's a huge chance that one of your units will straight up just die. If they made the Battle Scanner a Squad Upgrade and buffed it a bit more, then I might be able to throw myself more into enemies without worrying about bad positions or ending my turn there.