No you are absolutely not alone in thinking this and I believe this been discussed in these forums in and amongst other related issues, such as immersion and creating a coherent game world. I suspect what little understanding I have of the BG3/D&D setting is as a result of playing the original BG and Iceland Dale games circa 20 years ago so I have no idea what a newcomer would make of it all. And frankly at the end of Act 1 I was no closer to understanding who or what The Absolute is...eventually I just stopped caring, which was in marked contrast to my experience with the previous games.
It's the small details which make a game world believable and reveal to the player incrementally the lore, history, characters etc. in a game universe. When you start a game flying through the Hells on an alien ship with no idea why you're there and are then catapulted from said ship when it explodes and are suddenly suspended a matter of feet above the ground before hitting it...well that's an awful lot to ingest. Nevermind all the crazy info thrown at us from our outlandish companions, all these different Gods and Demons they'e involved with...ironically it is almost too much information but does little to actually ground us in the here and now ie. the nuts and bolts of a believable game world. It's like the mundane aspects of what make a game world work are overlooked in favour of the rule of cool, anything goes, explosions and dragons etc.
Personally I feel that Larian do not have a solid handle on how to create a D&D game worthy of its predecessors; it's like they are constantly trying to fit round pegs into square holes because their previous experience has always involved working with round pegs. It might well turn out to be a decent game in its own right no doubt but I felt like it lacks direction and is trying to be too many things.
