I'm not convinced that it has universal penetration though. In casual use most people are not going to bat an eyelash if Skryim is called a cRPG.
In casual use people aren't even going to bother whether Fallout is Fallout anymore ( https://external-preview.redd.it/8S...5c049f146fd52f24a5e7fe103413f547c21cb7cf) , or whether the next Bethsoft open world sandbox is an RPG or not. All they care about is that they're having fun whilst slashing monsters and exploring, and companies such as Bethesda/Bioware et all know that, which is fine. Even Steam does -- as sorting their roster of games by RPG brings up all kinds of stuff these days. All of these games are either way completely detached from what was trying to be achieved by Western RPG developers on computers during the 1980s/1990s, most of which flat out died during the turn of the century, be it Origin, SSI, Sir-Tech, Interplay/BIS, Troika, that list is as tragic as the state of AAA RPGs.
Does such a semantic debate matter? Probably not. However, in the party-based, (tactical) combat isometric/top-todwn RPG space harkening back to the likes of Ultima, Arcanum, Temple Of Elemantal Evil, Baldur's Gate and the like, DOS2 certainly was the most commercially successful. And most of all, hadn't it been for that void existing for like a decade plus back then -- DOS1 wouldn't even have been a crowd funding success expanding the scope of the game, the entire Original Sin franchise probably not even have existed in the first place.
Here's a neat interview with Swen talking how difficult it was to get games like these made in a market dominated by Skyrim et all, essentially being forced to go down the more "action" route prior.
