+1 , at this point I fear the best we can hope for is that they simply add some forgotten realms everyday life 'mundane, pastoralist, rural'-ordinariness to the current map. Suggestions I already made elsewhere which I think could somehow lessen the feelings described by OP and many others: add 'roaming' NPC of various kinds (e.g. merchant caravans, bandits, wildlife), add the necessities of life to make the world believable (e.g. an actual tavern, a farm - where do the people on the map grow their food?, some basic shops for clothes - see waukeens promenade in BG2 which had a lot of these, add some houses or other kinds of habitation structures - right now I simply wonder where all the grove NPC's are supposed to sleep, on the floor? - obviously atm there is no night so they don't "sleep",... etc etc etc.
I agree that a lot of this would amount to 'filler' and perhaps some players are more in favour of a really lean and stripped game where everything has a purpose but I hope they find some middleground and add some elements that suggest the game world is an actual world were people work, sleep, live their lives, etc.
An example to me would be the starting area(s) of Icewind Dale. IMO they did it better than BG1 in terms of starting areas that catapult you in a game world which is believable because of all the things that suggests what people do for a living and their 'way of life', e.g. fishing and fur trading, living in shacks with their kids, the alcoholic fisherman, villagers complaining in the tavern about the traderoute being blocked by harsh winter,etc.
If you compare this to BG3, for me, the BG3 world is super constructed, artificial, extremely meta-gamey, static, and overal giving the impression of a table-top dungeon or quest map instead of a 3d rendered fantasy world in which we as players can partake and explore but in which things also happen unrelated to our/the party's existence (everything has a quest related purpose, no 'flavour only' NPC's or structures: e.g. no farms, no housing, no tavern, no normal shops or markets, no travelers, no wildlife, no habitation outside of map 'hubs',...)