Argument by popularity leads to the conclusion that live services garbage is the best that gaming has to offer and One Direction is the best music. Let's please not go there.
Let's instead go have the world's best food at McDonald's.
When we're talking about a product, popularity is the only thing that matters.
When company's forget this and instead try to develope based on arbitrary ideas of what they think a consumer wants or needs they turn into modern Blizzard.
In other words, you want BG3 to become a bloated live service mess with a ton of microtransactions, because those are hella popular. Maybe add a battle royale mode too, because PUBG is so popular as well? And after all, popularity is really all that matters!1
That whole "chase popularity" nonsense is why almost every single triple-A game released is shallow and unsatisfying. They're not designed by people with a vision, they're designed to check the maximum amount of boxes to have all the popular stuff. You need "sidequests", you need "minigames", you need "exploration", you need crafting, resource gathering, survival elements, item tiers, you need some character level system so players can watch numbers grow into bigger numbers, you need battle passes, and most importantly, you need microtransactions!!
For all intents and purposes, modern triple-A game developers do to good ideas what Netflix has done to the Witcher.
