I don't think Larian expects players to be objective in their experience of the game, quite the opposite I'm sure they expected plenty of emotional investment. My thinking is just that they didn't expect people to treat Tav as a character who would have their own agency, rather than vessels for us to see the actual characters and the actual story.
As for this Astarion stuff in particular, I think that as an outcome for his story, it makes perfect sense. It's logical as an endpoint for that direction of his character and it tracks with the rest of the game in my opinion. That having been said, I think they should change it back. Not simply because it's triggering people, but because it's doing that and it didn't used to. They made a change that's really impacting people in a way the story did not when they first bought it. If this had been the game from the beginning then I'd beall for keeping it the same, but in this scenario, I think changing it back is the right call.
