I'm not a big fan of filler combat. PoE's problem was, unless they added a bunch of filler combat encounters after their "XP from defeating enemies" change, that it was too much pointless, boring combat.
I agree but that’s a problem not exactly tied to XP. Kingmaker had traditional XP and was also filled with tedious, copy pasted mobs.
I think PoE2 improved the formula - more handcrafted and varies encounters, XP given by doing stuff, and rewarded player for doing optional encounters with unique items. At the same time, it went very open world, while trying to support brief crit path resulting in massive over abundance XP and very steep negative difficulty curve. Try again Obsidian :-(
I think BG3 will suffer the same issue, unless they go D:OS2 way - pretty much require players to do most of the content through regular difficulty gating - or like was suggested will introduce levels limit per chapter. In which case “skipping” XP shouldn’t matter as long as players to enough stuff per chapter, and would prevent completionists from getting too far ahead.
