IMHO:

Baldur's Gate 1 is viewed as much better in retrospect than it was due to a combination of nostalgia, how good BG2 was, and the fact that anyone within the last 15 years or so played it ported into the much superior BG2 engine (first through mods, and more recently through BGEE). The plot of the game was cliché, the NPCs were as shallow as they come (you couldn't even talk to party members), and a lot of the minor encounters you have wandering through the forest have really jokey dialogue which seems out of place. A big part of what made it work so well though was that the CRPG genre had basically died in the mid 1990s, with Diablo clones becoming so omnipresent that even the Ultima series was dumbed down into a more action-heavy format. Baldur's Gate, despite its flaws, was far and away the most user-friendly and best put together adaptation of D&D on a computer till that date. And then BG2 happened, of course, and the rest is history.

In terms of successors - I do feel like in terms of story Dragon Age: Origins is the obvious choice. While the world is quite different and the mechanics work differently, some of the same creative folks were still involved, and we know Bioware wanted to do more D&D work, but lost the license for some reason. In general it feels like a deepening of what they had begun attempting to do with Baldur's Gate 2 in terms of development of companions, choices with in-game repercussions, etc.

I like the Pillars of Eternity games, but they honestly have never given me a strong BG vibe. If anything they remind me a good deal of Arcanum - perhaps even the old Fallouts a bit more.

I've only played a bit of Pathfinder: Kingmaker to date. It's a pretty good adaptation of paper and pen, but it doesn't feel very BG to me in particlar.

So far, aside from the lore of Forgotten Realms, very little of BG3 reminds me of the first two. I'm not sure if it's because there was a desire to set the game in the "present" of D&D (which is well past the time of the Bhaalspawn) or there were contractual reasons (like, does Bioware retain rights to the original characters, even if they lost rights to D&D?) But in terms of game mechanics it's clearly not trying to recreate the "classic era" either.