But you were just very limited. As I said: you could tell yourself that this is what you did with the mechanics. But even the dialgue possibilities with just the tag system are streets ahead today. In the old games you mostly had Answers 1,2,3,4 and they did not change much if you were another race, class or had some proficiency.
I wouldn’t discount a well implemented “illusion of choice”. Really, the end point is to make players believe that they choices matter, and I never had that issue with BG1&2. Not that many interesting things haven’t been done since BG1&2 (that includes it’s sibling, especially Planescape or recent Pillars of Eternity which for the most part adopted BG formula while adding reactivity to our race, class, background, ingame specified background, reputations etc.) it is still mostly flavour but serves “illusion of choice” well.
While BGs had very limited reactivity (in Bioware fashion, they were more focused on well constructed narrative and character arcs then flexible reactivity) the illusion of choice was well done. I played through BGs quite a few time, and while content wise playthroughs might not differ much, games allowed for enough player expression and provided compelling external motivations to feel convincing and engaging.
While BG3 reactivity is really impressive, it lacks the “illusion” part. Talking to people doesn’t feel like having conversations, a lot of reactivity seems to be centred about accounting for ways players can break the way, rather then provide engaging range of choice. I feel I have to do far more “imagining” in BG3 to give the PC any kind of personality or motivation, and that is something I never felt in BG1&2, in spite their limitations. I do think BG3 is spreading itself to thin, having to account for many different play styles and sandbox interactions and lacking “the core” of previous games. It’s cool that you can steal stuff from characters and they have lines recorded to account for that, but it also takes me out of the game - because character reaction simply doesn’t make believable sense.
PC’s content has to account for wild range of custom characters and Origins, and in the end lacks definition. Lots of impressive and cool stuff there, but it’s a lot of variations of a rather boring and inconsistent avatar (I wouldn’t call PC a character),