This seems a bit myopic. First, while I absolutely love the original BG games, many of the "quality of life" improvements that have become typical to games over the years are absolutely point blank humongous improvements. Early game gameplay in BG1 especially is total jank. Second, I don't actually think it's true that people can't enjoy these old-school games. I mean, there was an isometric renaissance (that probably LED to BG3) where a lot of the games played fairly similarly to the original Baldurs Gate series. So I don't actually think there's some humongous barrier preventing newer gamers from enjoying these games. I bet a lot of people bought into the series by 3 will go check out the previous titles.
Third, while the average fan of BG3 probably hasn't played the originals, we're not discussing an "average" gamer. We're discussing members of the Larian game studio, specifically those that worked on BG3. I think you should at least expect that the average person from that group should have some knowledge of the originals. I mean, you don't have to be 40+ to have played the originals. They came out around 25 years ago. I'm not 40 and I definitely played through and enjoyed them when they came out, though I am probably on the younger side of those who did, lol. But even long after they came out they remained popular and impactful.
Well, when the first Pillars came out, the then somewhat spoiled by all the "modern" amenities Bioware fans would complain about how it's ugly (which is ironic coming from somebody who thinks that Inquisition of all things is a pretty game...) and how there's too much reading. Meanwhile the original BG games are too "hard" and "unfair" (more like you are starting as a regular person who - guess what? - will probably die to a pack of wolves if not careful rather than someone who beats up devils and aberrations starting at level 1).
Same with the newer Fallout fan generation trying to get into the older games and being put off by - egads! - reading and "complexity" (as in the fact that you have to study the system a bit not to gimp your character, which is an amusing thought given how there are occassional questions asking for help building one in BG3 on the Steam forums, which, given how brain-dead 5e already is and how BG3 in particular holds your hand (albeit still not having class progression previews in-game...), is a rather sad display as to what the average player is capable of nowadays).
People would claim those games are "outdated" and "user-unfriendly", but their UI and mechanics were very intuitive to pick up even though I missed BG back in the day (having only played it in the early 10's first) - at least I did grow up with Fallout 2, and the smaller me was fine with both the mechanics and the reading somehow. And if the games even can become "outdated", why then does everyone complain about how they don't make them the same anymore, and how the old stuff was better (though somehow they mostly refer to the non-PC stuff, which I can't really get behind, since those ones really *are* wooden, ugly, and janky), and how the companies prey on the old IPs and brands to make easy buck off of brand recognition.
Larian aren't an exception to that, I am afraid, no matter how much people defend them. If this was truer to the originals, there wouldn't be the above argument. It may have been envisioned to be at some point, but they certainly stopped caring after they realised the older games' fans aren't their target demographic. Hence us getting the butchered cameo characters, the awful modern writing moments, and the over-reliance on "romance" as the selling point since the perpetually bothered Bioware-nurtured pixel-shaggers will eat it whole after, what, 6 years of abstinence? 9 even, if you skip Andromeda.
