Yeah, that's pretty much DOS2 combat in a nutshell.
Whoever said they were able to defeat that damn scarecrow by simply walking up to her and starting the fight there is a liar. Same for Alexander at the end of Act 1. Then again, the game by that point really drills it into your head that you're a dumbass if you're not stealth alpha striking every encounter, which is the entire point of being able to see potential enemies from so far away. The more I played the game in Tactician mode, the more I realized that each battle was more of an elaborate puzzle of how I could take control of the fight immediately and maintain control.
BG3 feels the same way to me. The main difference is that you're lacking the tools that DOS2 gave you to
regain control of a fight if something goes awry, and combat fields are even larger and more vertical than they were in DOS2. A bad dice roll in regular DnD is an unfortunate occurrence that your team suddenly has to adapt to. A bad roll in BG3 can immediately spiral into a wipe (especially if it's shove-related), and if your plan placed all bets on that one roll succeeding, you're probably shit out of luck.
The problem with continuing to design the combat like this is that it runs counter to the idea of having deeper character interaction mechanics that DOS2 did not have (in some cases you're just making it a lot harder on yourself by talking to that boss instead of ambushing them immediately, but you'll miss out on all that interesting dialogue and skill checks you'll want to make!). People ask for skill checks to be shared among the party, but what's the point if the following combat encourages you to keep the party split up? Are party members going to interject and assist in skill checks from halfway across the map? It's super immersion-breaking and I'm sure Larian has already run into this exact concern.
Strangely enough, DOS1 actually didn't give off this feeling at all, even though you had a lot of similar tools there. I suppose the main difference is that the game wasn't balanced around the idea that you'd be playing so dirty that it's basically mandatory.
