Saying that infinite resting was widely considered one of the shittiest things about the original BG's just strikes me as a rather aggressive exaggeration. The original games were about having a fun party-based D&D experience, not purity or hardcore experience or some such things. The people who hated constant resting challenged themselves to go without. The people who didn't mind simply rested when they felt like it. That's how I remember the community back then, anyway. It's been a few years, after all. But the point is, I simply do not recall there being all that much noise about resting mechanics back then.
Also, I don't remember any mods really doing a whole lot to discourage resting. The story also didn't really discourage resting as needed, when needed. Though of course there was the risk of getting interrupted if you tried resting in a dungeon. This was long before the days of Dark Souls becoming popular, so all that ridiculous "git gud" gobbo-vomit wasn't a thing either. There was no wide demand for a D&D game to be "hard core and punishing", there was simply joy over actually having a D&D party-based game. In my recollection, anyway.
And it was. It was a resource management mechanic, without any actual management, as resources can be reaquired at almost any time, any amount of times, making the whole system pointless.
And if you decided that you wanted to stop the RP and be super cheesy and rest a bunch of times in an uncleared dungeon in order to cheese infinite resources then that was on you. The games were not designed to punish cheesy behavior. Quite the opposite, I would think. The list of cheesy things in BG1 and 2 is rather hilariously long, after all. And the devs never really did anything to remove it. On the contrary, they added to it. Shield of Balduran? Use Any Items? No less than three different weapons that added +1 attack per round? Wish-resting? Scrolls of protection from magic and undead? Hasted rogues insta-hiding around any corner? Wands that recharge to max when sold at any vendor?
All of that stuff and so much more was in the game. And it was awesome. And it kept being awesome for a couple of decades, because at no point was it ever really about "playing the right way", it was simply about playing in whichever way that worked for you. And people then simply had fun in whatever ways they felt like. Whether you wanted to just laugh at suicide-beholders with the SoB or you wanted to grind them down the "proper" way, it was all good. Same with the big golems. Same with mindflayers. Dragons. Demilich. And so on.
