In my eyes the companions in BG3 also seem to cover all the usual personalities found in dating games which for me is a pretty big inducator what they were designed for.
I'm blaming Bioware for this, they started that trend (I love the Dragon Age games, but you see it there too)
Yes, thats when romance became mandatory and formalized on how they work (Mass Effect).
But there is still a lot of room for how you implement them. Compare Kingmaker/Wrath of the Righteous to BG3. With the Pathfinder games I never got the impression that companions are there to fulfil a romantic/sex fantasy role except Sosiel as the token gay character. But in BG3 I can't shake the feeling that romance/sex was a primary or at least very important design goal.
I don't know, I like most of the companions in BG3 without romancing them tbh. Apart from halsin, whose solely purpose seems to be sex kink tbh. But yeah, I would have been ok with not having all companions to be romanceable. I love Jaheira and Minsc and like, that they are not romanceable (I always found the Jaheira romance in BG2 creepy, because she just lost her husband - and I'm probably one of the few people, who actually liked Khalid)
"We are all stories in the end. Just make it a good one."
