Using oil barrels and the like to get through a big fight is plain cheese and should not be the game's expectation for how a player would deal with that encounter. Fighting anything more than 8 enemies in a battle is a tedious and boring chore.
I think barrels of explosives/oil/wine are ok when they are intended part of the encounter/environment. Problem arises when you can just collect all the bajillion of them all over the map and then do barrelmancy up the wazoo everywhere.
I really think they should weight much more so you can relocate them in the encounter area with STR character, but can't carry them in bags at all. Yes it might allow to still drag barrels across the map to other area, but at that point it's probably too much effort that is not worth it, as opposed to just yeeting a barrel out of your inventory.
It was less of an issue in D:OS2 despite there certainly being a lot of barrel BS too if you so desired, because your characters and abilities were massively more powerful as is. Here in BG3 though? Our power will be pretty tame even in Act 3 by D:OS2 standards and I certainly don't want barrelmancy to be a thing because it's so strong in comparison.
---
As for topic - I definitely think they need to do a lot of work speeding up these 20+ actors encounters. I can clearly see all failings of AI from D:OS2 here, where if an actor can't act it will just stand there burning 10 seconds of your time with some silly verbal threat nobody cares about after 3rd time you see it. I don't need to be given these 10 seconds to read it, I don't care really.
People try to blame homebrew Larian does for all the failures in the world, but reality is that these are good ol' D:OS2 quirks - you could give to each just basic attack and you'd still have all these issues, because the problem really is the pathing - inability by actor to act due to no path/stealth/bugs in many cases and Larian insistence to make sure we read that curse/threat NPC subsequently throws at us. This is THE no.1 time burner in these encounters as I see it.
