I also think some people are missing what the devs are saying as well. I think it is mostly:
1. Smaller studios cannot be expected to have a budget to pull off what BG3 is trying to pull off. 2. Other AAA studios are so corporate that the devs are not allowed to make a game like BG3.
I'm not positive they are exactly trying to make excuses as individual developers themselves. I think the Blizzard dev is more ripping Blizzard than anything (not sure if this is the exact article, but I know a Blizzard dev also commented apparently). For instance if Blizzard was in charge of the development of BG3 I imagine that it would:
1. Be online only somehow 2. Sacrifice tons of legitimate content for dice skins, armor skins and other microtransaction items 3. Things like Half-Orc and Dragonborn would have likely been paid DLC 4. There would likely be significantly less sub-classes and they would be included as paid DLC at a later time 5. They wouldn't have been given a six year development window 6. The game would have to be more commercially accessible and a lot of the content would likely be more tame to appeal to as wide of an audience as possible 7. Instead of being like 80-100 hours with tons of side content it likely would have been like 30-50 hours with a cliff hanger main story that released multiple paid for expansions
