There are many ways of adding rest limitations without soft locking games. It's just that many come with issues (mainly conflicts with BG3's existing game systems or certain playerbases would hate them). Boiled down to costs:
- Tedium - e.g., manually backtracking to an earlier resting site (incompatible with BG3's fast travel) and/or random encounters.
- In-game wealth - e.g., resting requires purchasable supplies, but then you have less $ for other gear. This is hard to balance for exponentially-increasing party wealth.
- Ineffectiveness - e.g., a Full Rest requires the use of limited supplies, but you can always Partial Rest and be brought to ~half effectiveness.
- Time - e.g., the story advances and/or companions get angry if you take too long. Ideally you'd get changed content, not lost.
- Modifiable - e.g., you can always go into settings and remove said restrictions, or restrictions are associated with certain Difficulty Modes.
- Probably more I can't think of...
That said, at this point in development Larian likely won't significantly modify their long rest system. The only remaining question is whether they actually limit the availability of food & supplies to be meaningful (maybe only in hard difficulty).
Notably, as the Partial Rest system is already in BG3(?), completely running out of food shouldn't soft lock anyone's game.
