The downside of doing quest with major branching paths is that generally one can offord to produce very few of those branches, so they end up feeling fairly arbitrary. That's is why, personally I favour variables over branching quests - by limiting scope of reactivity, I feel devs can cover more options and offer player choices on a more regular basis.
That’s my view, too. I think smaller choices that influence how NPCs react to us or the exact options we have for resolving later quests can cumulatively make the game feel very different on different playthroughs, even if we’re hitting basically the same story beats. And by not locking us into major branching paths, it allows us to build a twistier, more nuanced story for our characters.
For example, the BG3 story could potentially have us going to Cloakwood at some point and meeting Shadow Druids there no matter what path we follow, but depending on what we’d done earlier we could find it easier, harder or impossible to ally with them or even not to fight them.
Given that EA can already end up with Halsin dead or alive, and the grove open, locked down or destroyed, it feels as though adding some more options that could express the PC’s attitude to these outcomes or have them play different roles in bringing them about shouldn’t be too much work, even allowing for the need to add some further dialogue choices down the line to reflect them.
