Or ... here's a thought: Larian would not have hired those people in the first place (or not hired as many of them, or not given them as many work-hours), and instead hired/funded more people focused on the other aspects of the game. That's how production works, not just in making a video game but in any economic enterprise.
And as I said above, there are limits to the number of people who can work on the same thing at the same time. That is also how product development works in general.
The assertion that scrapping romance scenes would have meant addressing technical problems quicker is entirely dependent on whether Larian left the core programming team understaffed so they could blow as much as possible on everything else.
I think that is highly unlikely as they would be amongst the most key roles, and I’ve seen no evidence to suggest otherwise.
Edit: Although they apparently don’t have the resources to fix this G Damn forum.
Animation are subcontracted. Doing less thirsty romance animations does not mean that someone at Larian now has nothing to do but that less money is paid to a other company where Larian ordered animations from. That money would then be available to hire additional employees, push the release further back to have the existing employees work for longer on BG3 of, if you have to use it on animations for some reason, order different animations that are more relevant to the story or a new companion (or some non-sex Halsin content).
