Yeah, I've never seen anyone say they like Abdel unless they're trolling. In addition to being a stereotypical meathead, he is intensely unlikeable, cheats on Jaheira with a villain from BG2 and so forth. The books he comes from are terrible (even the author said they were bad because he had like 2 weeks to write the first one and hadn't played the game or something. It shows).
It's also ironic because if the books themselves were truly canon, Jaheira would not even be alive in BG3, because she died in the last book.
