Nobody needs to do anything, of course. After my second playthrough, I realized 99.9% of lootable containers are either empty or contain vendor trash worth 5 gold, so I stopped checking them altogether unless they looked important. My playing experience improved considerably, since I didn't spend upwards of 5 minutes monotonously clicking through every pile of boxes and barrels in case one of them had something good.

This begs the question, what purpose do all the containers serve? Aside from looting, what are the interactions? You can move some of them around – to no particular end. There is no cover system in the game, so you can't construct makeshift cover from boxes, for example. You can, perhaps, stack them to reach some places – except the game provides much better, quicker options for terrain traversal. I was able to use them once to block a side entrance to prevent enemies from flanking me, which was interesting, but with most maps being wide or open spaces, it's not a common application, and doesn't require the boxes to be lootable besides. You can put things in them – to no particular end, again, since you can send loot to camp from anywhere with no restrictions in 2 clicks. You can break them – for no benefit whatsoever. So what are they here for?

As far as I can tell, both in the DOS games and in BG3, this is an attempt to make the world more "interactable". You can look into every box, move every thing, pick up every useless bauble – interactivity! Except not really, because these interactions have no practical application 9 times out of 10. In games with highly interactive worlds, like Arx Fatalis, the interactions have a function, they serve a purpose. In BG3, they don't. Some of the useless loot will become more valuable once the crafting system is in, but most of it? I doubt it. And it won't solve the problem of hundreds of empty boxes you can't do anything with littering the maps. The only thing it does is distract the player from playing the game, as Gray Ghost said, RPG players will naturally try to loot everything. That can't be good.