It almost seams as if Larian is trying to imitate the wrong era of BioWare games.

This is exactly my impression.
"pushing romance" exists in BG3 because it wants to get the same attention W3 got. While romance was an organic and very successful part of W3's story it is not like that in this game.
They aren't copying The Witcher games with pushing romance so much, they're copying modern BioWare and making it worse.