Agree that being (relatively) cautious with long rests should be the way to play. That'd be more immersive, tactical, and fun in my eyes. The current encouragement to frequently long rest feels silly and makes the combat encounters trivial, which completely destroyed my desire to play through the game. I did not enjoy feeling like I needed to long rest after every encounter/new area/important dialogue or risk missing companion content. If companion dialogues were untied to long resting and there were actual consequences for resting too frequently (Lae'zel disapproves and/or goes on ahead, consumables expire, you start turning into a mindflayer, druids progress on their ritual, something), I think the game would be better.
Restrictions on long resting would work too (e.g., can't rest until X resources have been spent and/or all companions are willing to rest), but I'm less in favor of such hard restrictions.
