If they didn't put in class strongholds I would be disappointed. The points for it; it was in Baldur's Gate II, it was wildly popular.
Yes, but while effective, they weren't substantial - they were essencially very short quest chaines specific to player's class unlocked after completing a relevant dungeon (which is available to everyone). I suspect Solasta's background quests were more expensive features then Strongholds in BG2. An equivalent in BG3 coud be Tav Druid being offered a role of chief druid after solving the local conflict, which would result is a brief quest chain.
Pointing to how small Strongholds really were isn't criticism BTW - if anything, later successors (NWN2, PoE1, Kingmaker) did a mistake by making a Strongold/Keep a more substantial presence - game systems tied to those are never fun, and having to go back to one place over and over again just doesn't fit a game about adventuring forward.
In BG2 having a base was rather meaningless - all Strongholds brought is reactivity to our choice of class, something that BG3 already invested many more resources through into then BG2 did.
That must be said, though, that Strongholds in BG2 really did work - it was smart, and I suspect a cost effective, way of giving played a different flavour based on their class. For them to work, though, some starts need to allign: They need to be accessible throughout the game and to not be prohibitivaly costly they need to utilise areas build for other purposes.
Still, something in spirit of strongholds (class specific quests, consisting of handful of nodes staggered over a period of time) could be a cool thing to have - however, so far I haven't seen Larian as very keen of giving unique content to classes - spells with potentially cool or unique features are made widely available thrugh items or scrolls, and in general their philosophy seems to be to allow for skinning a cat in multiple ways, rather then providing different cats for different classes, so to speak.
