As per the title, the non violent solution in this game overwhelmingly just means losing experience and gear. The only exceptions I have seen so far are few and far between and generally come down to getting the non violent reward and killing them later, for example,
the tadpole extraction in the Githyanki Creche. If you talk your way out of the fight, you get inferior experience and no additional gear, whereas the fight offers the better experience and a few unique items. However, the entire creche is going to turn hostile anyway, so you will then get the experience, gear and non violent experience reward.
Avoiding fights themselves is not much of a reward. This should only be considered a benefit in of itself where the fight is genuinely difficult, and this is seldom the case. Take the hide and seek quest with the child for example - doing the 2nd stage without getting caught is significantly more troublesome than the fight, and you get the same item minus 450 experience.
Maybe some of these non violent solutions will have a late game payoff when the characters appear again later on, but in a lot of cases, this honestly seems rather unlikely.
Then there is the added annoyance that some of the most significant non violent approaches are just completely invalidated as the game ultimately forcefully turns everyone hostile.
For example, the aforementioned Githyanki Creche or the Goblin Camp after you kill the Hobgoblin boss, even if you managed to kill him and the 2 others without leaving any witnesses. I killed him from stealth without being detected and the entire camp still turned hostile, which is somewhat incongruous with the fact that I was able to kill entire packs having broken stealth without the whole place turning hostile.
More effort should have been put in to make the non violent option feel like a valid choice, not just the wrong choice and also to not completely undermine your approach by turning the whole map hostile unavoidably anyway. I am not saying there should identical rewards to both approaches. That would be contrived and less interesting. They should offer alternative rewards and in some cases, such as dodging a hard fight, the non violent solution might reasonably offer a clearly inferior reward. In some cases, it should offer better rewards, and in some cases, it might be ambiguous or party dependent as to which is better.
