Seems to me like a strawman to be comparing the old BG games to something being made today. The more appropriate comparisons would be the RTwP combat of Pathfinder to the TB combat of BG3.
I am not sure what you mean by that - the biggest difference between 2000s and now is eyecandy, and in that regards Pathfinder doesn't present itself that much better than BG1&2. Combat wise the games aren't actually that different. I can't really think of anything Pathfinder had, that BG1&2 didn't (more complex ruleset of course, but I don't think that's what we are discussing).
Well for me it is a big part (though perhaps not all of it). I hated 2e and considered it to be horribly boring and simplistic in every way, including of course combat. By contrast I love 3.5e and consider 3.5e combat to be both challenging and fun at the same time. But it's not just that. Having it be RT(wP) makes it so very dynamic, realistic, and way more challenging than TB combat. This is why combat in WotR is truly a joy for me, so long as I'm not fighting through a million demons in an entire city.
In fact, if there is just one thing Larian could do to make BG3 a significantly better and more fun game for me, it would be if they gave me an auto-resolve option for all combats. A lesser but still acceptable alternative would be to allow me to change the difficulty settings anytime anywhere, and give me a hyper-easy combat difficulty setting, so that I can breeze through all combats quickly and not be bogged down in the tiresome tedium of BG3 combat.
