At the very start of the game you're giving a ticking clock with an unknown amount of time on it in the form of the parasite. Your character has no way of knowing when they will turn, and them turning not only kills them, but also makes them a danger to everyone around them that's far greater than any of the stakes established in the opening. Goblins have absolutely nothing on a quartet of Illithid showing up.
This is entirely fine in and of itself, but the character is then given very clear and obvious breadcrumbs to follow to resolve that ticking clock, which require you to functionally ignore the entire game if you want to pursue them in a realistic fashion.
Absolutely nobody is going to concern themselves with a refugee crisis when at any moment they could turn into an illithid and turn the refugee camp into a new illithid hive, and, importantly, they know exactly where they need to go to potentially prevent that eventuality.
Very little needs to be changed to fix this. The first is to remove any reference to anyone having seen Githyanki nearby, and to make the implication that nobody has ever seen gith before the crash. This ensures that while the ticking clock is stressful and threatening, there's no clear way to resolve it, and the player can decide how their character would go about trying to deal with a looming threat with hypothetical resolutions (greater restoration, gith shenanigans) but no clear path toward any of those solutions because they don't know where they would find a powerful enough healer, or make contact with the Githyanki.
One bonus to this method is that it transforms the mission from "go find the gith" to "do your best to find something to help you, while waiting for the gith who were chasing your ship to show up" which actively encourages you to stay in the immediate vicinity, and involve yourself in the local concerns. The gith patrol can still trigger identically at the same location, gameplay doesn't need to meaningfully change, but there's a big difference between the player knowing to progress the plot they need to go to X, and the character knowing that in order to save their life they need to go to X.
The goblin breadcrumb is fine, except that once you've learned about the healer you don't have any realistic dialogue options to try to bribe your way in to see them, and murdering your way in probably works mechanically because video game, but murdering their guards is a completely unrealistic way for someone to approach a doctor.
I should note that the druids might hold a breadcrumb that resolves some of this narrative tension, but the druids are established by the opening text to be so concerned about some goblins killing them all that they're going to do a ritual to seal their grove, and one of them is killed by goblins on a scouting mission. If they have anyone powerful enough to reasonably be thought to be useful, the game needs to much more heavily foreshadow that akin to the goblin's reference to their super healer. Druids are potentially useful, but druids that are terrified of goblins are very much not.
TL:DR The characters (not the player) need to hit a brick wall in dealing with their infection in order to justify literally anything else they do, and it takes way too much time to reach that brick wall, assuming it exists at all, to allow meaningful engagement with the multitude of other things that are going on, or to even justify some of the fundamental narrative tension between NPC's.
