I completely disagree with your suggestion that an epic start is a bad one. Many other games had such an introduction in the past and it worked really well, for exemple Skyrim, Mass Effect 3, even WotR is up there... It hooks the player and establishes the stakes in an elegant way. Starting as a weak nobody in nowhereland where nothing happen is also a valid trope but objectively not a better one.
I think your point is sound, but I would argue that BG3 doesn't do a good job executing on its opening. I'm gonna push aside ME3 because I think that game doesn't belong in this discussion for one specific reason; it's the final game in a trilogy. The series has been escalating since the first game so of course the start of 3 is gonna start off more high octane. BG3 may also technically be a sequel, but it's not like it's a direct continuation. It's starting from scratch with a new story and has to build it's stakes from But looking at the other two games they do something important that BG3 fails to. They start you off, right off the bat, small. Skyrim? You start off as a mundane prisoner being taken to execution and you get to give a sense of why you might have ended up that way. WotR? You start off being revived and then getting to talk to folks in a simple festival. You get the vibe of the world you're living in, you get to get your bearings. In Skyrim you'll also probably see a regular town within your first couple hours of playtime. In BG3 you literally don't get to see anything approaching normal for the first third of the game. You have no grounding, no context, it's all just a lot of weird, wild stuff getting thrown at you all at once.
