I can see where the OP of this thread was coming from.
However, I do not feel like the lack of exposition is necessarily a bad thing and also that it is partly unavoidable and pretty much intented design with the narrative direction of atleast the first act.
I personally hate forced exposition and much prefer the style of writing where I'm thrown into the "deep end" only for the story to slowly reveal the grand picture to me. Obviously this does demand a different attitude from the gamer, opinions can differ.
BG1 & BG2 weren't too different at all in this regard however. Especially in BG2 (first game of the series / forgotten realms I played) I had absolutely zero clues about what was going on. In regards to that I feel like BG3 already does a much better job, which is normal as this is the case for most older vs newer games.
The first act of the game is also all about not knowing why you've been taken on the mindflayer ship, who the absolute is or generally what the hell is going on. The followers of the absolute are even programmed to be unable to tell you or to have to hide the truth. Given that there's a whole slew of people on YouTube and reddit who love datamining the game and speculating about the actual underlying plot, it's clear that this is an approach many people (me included) enjoy as well. I'm pretty sure that act two will have a lot more answers in this regard guiding us to a final resolution in act three.
As for forgotten realms knowledge: exposition with pop-up text like in the Pathfinder games is pretty much not possible here given much more voiced content. Kingmaker and the first few hours of Wrath that I played through are not the perfect examples of "show don't tell" mentality either in my opinion. I frankly found the massive info dumps you get sometimes extremely tiring and detrimental to those games' pacing.
An elegant way to do it would be to include much more, "tell me more about", dialogue options with the companions to talk about their personal lives and experiences and impart knowledge of the world through that. That is already present to some extend but could be expanded upon.
Another idea is to add appropriate visitor NPC's to the camp when in certain locations which you can ask about the locale and various lore relevant to that stage of the game. For example a travelling family when in the first area, a bunch of tieflings in the druid grove, some random adventurer in the underdark etc.
