I'd personally played Divine Divinity before, many, many years ago... and written it off as a fairly trashy generic iso rpg that was full of bugs, broken quests and ridiculously bad balance that make it amusing to play, but not memorable (apart from the demon-driven coercive rape of a servant by a possessed minor... classy).... just another example of a game which had dozens of other similar game just like it at the time.
Beyond that, I had no real presence from them on my radars, until BG3.
The resurgence of popularity and interest in crpgs is not the 'result' or 'thanks to' any particular game - these things rarely ever are. There are many other factor outside of the games themselves which control this and influence it.
The main driving factors, from my personal perspective, that have influenced the returning interest in crpgs has been the massively growing and expanding audience interest and visibility across many platforms and mediums, of D&D and TTRPGs in general surrounding that, over the past decade. There was absolutely going to be a BG3 game, with or without Larian, because that is where the market interest is right now, and it's not there as a result of Larian's games, successful as they are ( and I'm not denying that they are hugely successful).
