I'm not comparing the games, I'm using Skyrim to show that you can have an insanely successful release (well beyond what pretty much any dev could ever dream of having) without player VA, or a focus on extravagant cinematics.
Minecraft was even more successful and it also didn't have voice acting and cinematics. Why wouldn't that be a more convincing example?
Skyrim is just a completely different genre of game. There's no point comparing them in this respect. Neither Minecraft nor Skyrim nor Baldur's Gate are RPGs. Roleplaying is not the primary focus in any of these games.
That said, I'll provide what I think would be a fair literal definition of a roleplaying game: a game about designing your own character and exploring/roleplaying that character through social and story interaction. By that definition Baldur's Gate 3 is a stronger RPG than any of its earlier instalments.
In the end, when you find a game on Steam that's tagged as an RPG, it doesn't mean anything about the actual gameplay. It's just a marketing buzzword.
Anyway, BG3 is a story-driven game with roleplaying elements (NPCs reacting to your fantasy race, etc). It's really in the context of that genre that we need to consider the importance of voice acting.
