You keep arguing about canon, but this discussion isn't about canon, it's about the feel of the setting as it has existed up until this moment. Those things are related, but not inherently the same. You keep talking like the fact that BG3 is canon now suddenly makes the setting as it has been presented all this time suddenly fundamentally different. Yes, BG3 suddenly now makes the setting into one where factories and such can now exist and be normal. But it WAS NOT THAT BEFORE. It was once one thing, now it is a different thing. And what KR is saying is that it is now a different thing because Larian did not like the thing it was before. Larian were given permission to change that thing, yes, but they DID change it. Key word here being CHANGE, make it something it did not used to be. And KR is saying that the reason they changed it is that they were not happy with how it was before. She is suggesting that if they had been happy with it as it had been, they would not have included all the other stuff that they did. Because it did not exist or behave this way before Larian's influence, and the reason it does now is because Larian saw that it was not to their liking before and included new things to make it so. Things that WotC had to look at and decide they were okay with.
That's why I asked those questions about if new york were to be transplanted into the setting or if the setting is inherently a nonsense setting. Because even if WotC decides today that yes, all those things are true, that does not retroactively mean the decisions line up and make sense with what the setting has been before that decision. The only way that would be the case is if the Forgotten Realms were in fact a nonsense setting where anything goes.
