Marketing and lack of serious bad press, rival franchises going downhill, video games becoming mainstream as a whole. It helps that almost everything is voiced. A video game these days doesn't need to be perfect, it needs to fail to be off-putting. Most non-RPG fans find reading too much massively off putting, for example, so you need to work around that. Bg3 became popular for most of the same reasons the Witcher 3 did. All around competence > being exceptional in one or two aspects, and downright bad in others.
If you're going to go the extra mile, make the world "alive"... something both games also committed to. Truthfully, a lot of people want to play. The fewer you scare away, the bigger your success. It's as simple as that.
