Pathfinder Kingmaker is Eurojank.
Pillars of Eternity 1 has an absolutely awful start, with PoE2 being better but I'd imagine many folk didn't give it a chance after how bad PoE1. Myself included till my friend gifted it to me.

As I spoke before about these games: They are incredibly flawed. Pathfinder Kingmaker is a buggy, frustrating mess with broken quests that can easily break if you do them in the "wrong" order or leave you absolutely confused because the quest text tells you to do thing A but it actually wants you to do a completely unrelated thing F. Because it has a script trigger to move the story forward even if it makes no logical or fantastical sense as to why.

It also over did the Alignment choices to the point that they are either incredibly silly or nonsensical. Like saying things moves your alignment instead of doing things. So you can act like a goody two shoes and game goes "Yes you are actually a good person for saying these things".

Don't get me wrong Pathfinder Kingmaker is a fun game if you are hardcore enough to look past its many, many flaws. And I can say I enjoyed parts of it to the point of wanting to see how the devs improve with WotR. It will be great to see and I'm looking forward to it. But it's way too flawed and many people seem to look past that because its a cRPG.

I'm not entirely sure what is the point of even finding a "worthy successor" from the games mentioned. I personally just want a good cRPG that does what it set out to do. At the moment BG3 fails in what it set out to do which was being a faithful 5e game set in FR and a sequel to BG2. Will this change? Maybe. It's Early Access so it might.