Normally a game spending years in EA is not a good sign. I'd guess development is not going smoothly.
I think that in hindsight, Larian would not have released EA until 2021. But that doesn't mean development is going poorly, it could just as well mean they did a crappy job of assessing how long the game would take to develop.
I think if we are thinking about things in normal situations that it would 'almost' always be a bad thing for Early Access to drag on for years. I think the issues with it are both in that it seems to usually point to development issues and could also lead to your most hardcore player base burning itself out on the game before release.
But in this case I imagine a lot of what is taking so long is:
1. Baldur's Gate 3 is a massive undertaking. It would not shock me if the game offers hundreds of hours of gameplay while also containing branching story paths, player choice, tons of classes, spells, races, etc. while also including quality graphics and a lot of little things like every conversation zooming into to be somewhat cinematic in nature.
2. But even more so I imagine that Larian underestimated how much the pandemic, lockdowns, the panic over COVID, etc. would impact their development as it seems to have impacted all development teams. I think if they were able to wrap their heads around this ahead of time we would have likely got Early Access sometime from mid-2021 to early 2022... because I think the game will probably end up coming out late 2022 to mid-2023.
