I also made the mistake of not Long Rest-ing enough early on.

As an RPG veteran with strong completionist "Avoid the main quest and do everything else first" tendencies, I didn't have as many problems of missing major information... But I also took the "This parasite will kill in in a matter of days" situation to mean that Long Rests were a countdown to death -- similar to Pathfinder:WotR having some early game timed events based on resting too much. Plus, I just wasn't really getting in that many combats in between story beats, so I didn't feel the need to rest to replenish resources. Thus, my first playthrough missed a number of the early camp cutscenes. To say nothing of how I managed to accidentally dodge my way past every companion recruitment point except Shadowheart, until I finally got several encounters deep and was like "I feel like I should have more party members by now" and had to try harder to find the others.

I feel like with this genre of RPG, you do have to be a little bit lenient with not taking "Time is of the essence!" things too literally, and knowing that the game has a vaguely intended path for you that straying too far from will break. But I do also agree that it's a bit too easy to break some of BG3's sequencing by mistake. I feel like there were times that characters acted like they had told me things in previous conversations that must have been down other dialogue paths, or something, because I certainly didn't remember learning it.

The Long Rest / Camp Event system is interesting, but I definitely feel like it does strange things to the pacing of playing the game. I missed so many early events because I didn't know they'd be waiting for me, and then I spent the rest of the game trying to guess what narrative events were "worthy" of triggering some kind of event back at camp, eventually leading to me just Long Resting far more than I actually needed purely to check if anything would happen. It'd be a minor QoL improvement if the game would just tell you when one was waiting, but that doesn't remove the awkwardness it can create to the flow of the adventure.