I like surfaces. I think the game should strength and extend the surface effects.
I do to. In D:OŚ games. Definitely a system worth iteration and improving upon. But in BG3 they just don’t fit too well.
I'm quite torn on surfaces.
On the one hand, they can be interesting, adding in more tactical options and various combinations (Especially in DOS where surfaces also had the option for clouds that sat above them providing a second layer of "Surface")
On the other hand, there's plenty of jank with them. Such as attacking targets creating the blood surface that overrides any other material directly below them (At least in DOS this could still allow Electrified to persist as blood interacted with electrified water to become electrified itself) and of course the effects of surfaces being pretty wild in some situations (I recall in DOS2 getting defeated a bunch because electrified surfaces causing stun meant that if you ran out of Magic Armour you were perma-stunned)
Surfaces definitely need game systems to be designed around them, rather than shoehorning surfaces into a system that doesn't account for them like in BG3.
Though, I can still see them being tricky to get right, especially when trying to tune the power so that they're not so weak as to be useless and not so strong that you play with surfaces more than actual skills (Similar to how in ME3 the damage of combos was so high that actual skills and skill damage was irrelevant, it was all about proccing the combo damage)
