Although your public key generates your wallet address but it’s worth knowing that  your public key is indirectly your wallet address…your public key is always in an hexadecimal format and that  stops at (“F” as in 15) unlike your address which already undergo some procedures to becoming it and it has different possible alphabet chats..
Your Public key undergoes hash and encoding procedure to become your address so that’s why you’re not paying to a public key but a public key hash when you generate a Segwit wallet address type which is P2WPKH  or a legacy which is P2PKH.
P2WPKH- Pay-to -witness public hash- as you can see you’re paying to a public key hash and not directly to a public key and same goes to P2PKH - pay-to public key hash..
Hence, it’s actually possible to pay-to public-key directly but instead of undergoing an hash it only get encoded..
I hope you got this basic explanation