Surfaces are present in D&D but not in the way BG3 handles them.
A smart party of D&D players will use a lot of oil and ignite it as well as use poison because doing so is a lot of free damage. But oil burns for 2 turns and does 10 damage total. Poison only works for one strike.
And lots of effects in tabletop D&D create "difficult terrain" which halves movement or knocks you prone. So where are the ball bearings? Where are the swampy bits of ground?
I think that the surfaces are indeed present in D&D but they're of a very different flavour.
There's your example of surfaces handled well, oil burning for 2 turns and only doing 20 damage total? Perfect. That's a reasonable balance. Also, is there a saving through against the burning oil? (seem like a lot of burning effects have a saving throw against them to halve the damage). The difference that instead of only lasting 2 turns and doing a max of 10 damage in BG3, I can make a massive pool of fire that will burn for a stupidly long time and has no maximum damage cap, meaning that any enemy in the middle of this pool of fire isn't capped to only taking 10 damage so they can (and have) very easily burned to death by running to get out of the fire, even with plenty of HP left. If surfaces lasted less time and had a max cap on the damage they could deal, and also required either a higher level spell or some kind of extra ingredient such as oil/grease for fire to burn then it would probably be easier to handle. As is I can just have my Eldritch Knight and Wizard spam firebolt or ray of frost cantrips all over the place to create areas that burn or knock enemies prone
