IMHO, "dumbed down" is one of those phrases that's best avoided.
It's a matter of perspective too. You may all call 'em classics, but for the chief designer of the Realms Of Arkania series, Baldur's Gate was the game that had shown there was a market for "light role-playing games". And compared to Realms Of Arkania, BG
is pretty "dumbed down"/streamlined if you will.
(For the record, BG1 is one of my all-time favourite games, but I too enjoyed the RoA games very much).
https://rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=8620As for BG3 being the face of D&D, I hope it's successful enough that WOTC may consider kick-starting (heh) an all new series of different D&D RPG games, and hopefully in different universes too. Ravenloft... wouldn't mind a similar format to the oldies, which were sort of FPS with sort of real-time combat (works well in a Gothic/Horror setting imo). Surely the high-point for D&D games both in numbers as well as diversity were the late 80s/early 90s. You had dungeon crawlers like Eye Of The Beholder, the classic Gold Box series, an early MMORPG, Dark Sun, the horror of Ravenloft, even fighting games.
