To be fair, Owlcat never publicly confirmed the total number of main (as in, non-mythic path specific) companions for Pathfinder WotR either. The very last companion is never publicly talked about in any promotional material either, and a lot of new players wouldn't know about this last party member at all unless they looked them up in advance.
Not a big thing to get hung up over, really. I don't recall knowing the total number of companions before release/during early release being standard practice at all, it's just that the way the DOS games handled that (of which it was a byproduct of the Origin system in DOS2) might have conditioned a lot of people into thinking it was.
adding more party characters in pathfinder wotr will be much easier compared to bg3 IMHO. if anything wotr creating the characters will require less budget. a nicely hand-drawn portrait, text-based dialogue (with some voiced) no real cinematics required. that's being said, i rather have larian focused on the meat of the gameplay like what owlcat was doing rather than big AAA budget for cinematics and full voice over. this is no brainer we wont get much companions, NPCs, let alone branching dialogue and choices. those budget can really just used and focused on said gameplay like reactions, more writings, branching dialogues and perhaps multiple endings too. only main acts and important conversation should have cinematics and fully voiced in my opinion.
