Cutscenes are so 1990s, like when everybody and their least favourite studio tried to ape the big movies upon the storage capacity problem of disks was finally lifted (CD-Rom, etc.) And yes, this is meant to be a polemic -- at least a little bit (Bioware / BIS back then actually advertised their 5 disks of BG to be full of gameplay rather than video as a unique selling point, and could do so, (see "General Info") but the times they are a-changin').
One of my first good memories of BG3 /EA from last year wasn't actually connected to anything cinematic or "scripted". There's a bunch of skeletons lying around in a crypt that rise when you push a button. SPOILER: IT'S A TRAP! Well, upon "knowing" that and reloading (I know, it's a bit meta), I picked up their rotten corpses and threw them into a fireball trap -- and then pushed the button triggering their rise.
However, it was the the eventual carefully scripted cutscene flat out ignoring my actions and ruining that moment somewhat. As cinematics are scripted by their nature: In the lovingly hand-crafted movie showing the advance, the skeletons rose in their usual place. Fade out, and them being burned by the fireballs someplace else completely. I even reported this as a possible bug back then. https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Main=88275&Number=680547#Post680547
Whilst blockbusters such as The Witcher or Mass Effect 2 are like 90% cutscenes to sit through (only slightly exaggerating for effect), and more and more games naturally start aping them: Moments arising out of interactions and gameplay will always trump any cutscene tenfold (go ask Warren Spector, a name which the Ultima fans at Larian may recognize).
That is, for as long as they aren't ruined by the inevitable cutscene which at best would be the icing on the cake, e.g. a dramatically shot and staged sequence showing skeletons actually rising in the hells of fireballs; however, perhaps inevitably, it wasn't meant to be.
Additionally, what others have already said. If every conversation starts out with the same sequence of Hollywood-wannabe, it eventually gets tiresome. Games can for sure be like movies, but they don't have to be like all the friggin time. Does anybody remember Gabriel Knight 2? It had the actors even "acting out" the most mundane tasks via a cutscene/movie sequence, such as picking up any generic object. All the bloody time. At the end of this clip, there's even a sequence specifically framed to show the actor not only picking up the newspaper, but also putting it down again. In the first game of the series, when it was all just pixel art and simple animations, nobody bothered to do that. You can easily imagine the makers going: We're now just like the movies, yeah, so let's show it off some!
The greatest strength of tabletop gaming / D&D is all in players improvising, in acting out characters and situations and the dungeon master dynamically moderating it all -- BG3 at its very best actually acknowledges this on many levels, as Larian are such a proponent of "systems driven gameplay", which makes it all the more painful when the rest of the game is so "static". It's like two fundamentally opposed philosophies clashing: One for the actual "game", and the other for the storytelling technique. At worst, it's actually as if both the systems guys and the cinematic guys were working from different countries (which, the way Larian are set up, they may actually do). Maybe one day some RPG developer will find a visual language that lifts this to that level rather than just aping all the big dogs and blockbuster cinema becaues of "It's popular!".
(And I acknowledge that must be a massive challenge whilst appreciating the work going into cutscenes all the same).
In the meantime, I'm actually more "immersed" in the "story book" sections of PoE or Pathfinder. Whilst they too may be aping what's always existed and for a time was pretty popular -- they are at least interactive and recognize RP games as a medium of interacting rather than sitting there and watching. Additionally, they likely cost way less and thus eat up way much less ressources which can be spend on something else. I really don't rate Bethesda much these days, but the one credit I give them is that they don't follow suit here, despite the many criticisms even of professional games journalism how all of their stuff should be way more "cinematic", including dialogue sequences. Sure, they don't focus on plot and characters near as much as opposed to exploration. But still.
