I'd honestly much prefer more consistent shreds of information spread out, with patch notes when new patches come out, than the panels from hell. I've honestly never watched one and never really been interested in doing so. All the information I actually care about is in the patch notes. Granted, that's down to my personal tastes, and plenty of people seem to enjoy the panels, including Larian themselves from what it seems like. So good for them. But I can present an example of a similar early access situation going on right now.
Owlcat is allowing players to pay for access to the alpha version of their upcoming Rogue Traders game. I don't know how much they're communicating directly with those alpha testers, but Owlcat is even now releasing writeups and bits of information about about the setting and characters, concept art and such. I'm not part of the test, but let me tell you, those bits of info are doing doing more to get me interested and excited for that game than I've felt for BG3 since maybe the beginning of EA. Larian could very easily be doing that as well, and I imagine that Rogue Traders and BG3 are going to come out in either roughly the same timeframe, or Rogue Traders is going to come out AFTER BG3, so in terms of marketing, I don't think timelines are too big a factor. Panels from Hell may be big and flashy, but they're not really necessary, and I don't think they're the best way to get information out. I think Larian could probably save a decent chunk of money and time just doing regular livestreams and posting dev diaries every two to four months or something, and they'd probably be able to convey the same amount of information.
Again, I don't think panels from hell are bad, people clearly enjoy them. But I think that the main reason to make such a production of releasing a new patch isn't because it's the best way to convey information, it's to build hype. Yet if that's the goal, then they should be supplementing that with more info given between panels, because whatever hype the panels build inevitably fizzles away in the months of silence. If you want to talk about AAA developers communicating with the fanbase, I'll point you at Bioware. They regularly share profiles of their devs and writers, they boost art and cosplay, and they have little yearly events for N7 day and Dragon Age day that involves a lot of fan engagement. You could argue that much of those things have little substance when it comes to the actual games they're making, but I would argue that they actually have less to share in development terms than Larian does. Oh, and they've also published a book and numerous short stories set in the dragon age universe. It's not a perfect analogy, but it's still an example of devs trying to provide trickles of community engagement and attention.
