It's been a while since I played it but I'm fairly you that in DOS2 you could travel to any waypoint from any location as long as you had it unlocked and weren't in combat.
But yeah, even Larian themselves are guilty of removing complexity found in their older games in favour of making it more mass-marketable. People like to blame publishers for all evil in the world, but in reality it's just an inevitable outcome once a studio or franchise becomes big enough to stand on its own legs.
