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.
Books aren't voiced in BG3 so there's already precedent for there being read-only text.
The rest of your arguments against exposition pop-ups are personal preferences, so I can't argue with those except to say I disagree and that I would prefer optional extra knowledge (that my character should probably know) in the form of exposition pop-ups.
I would much prefer these over actual voiced dialogue, where our character selects multiple "What is X?" prompts during dialogues to get this information. That would get tedious and is very unimmersive in my eyes.
Opinions differ indeed.
Of course there can be more books explaining all manner of things, pretty much no one can be against that. But most people probably won't even touch those very much.
Perhaps a good codex like thing in which you can read up in extensive detail would then be the best solution. Especially if it's illustrated richly etc. One could even include some popups directing to the codex in a tutorial like manner.
