You have a very wrong understanding of what "waifu" means. A waifu is a woman who loves you unconditionally - just for who you are.
Uh... No.
A waifu is someone's ideal romantic partner. Or more commonly, a character that people have parasocial feelings for.
This doesn't involve unconditional love. It doesn't even involve any kind of interaction with said character such as a video game romance.
Heck, there's the whole litany of "Dere" types that people very much enjoy, that are outright awful and disgusting (Such as Yandere, whereby someone is ridiculously possessive to the point of wanting to or actually murdering anyone else you interact with, or Tsundere where they hide their positive emotions towards you by instead being mean and hurtful towards you). Which are typical traits of many people's "Waifus" and especially popular in anime/manga characters.
Why do you think the author of Fifty Shades of Grey became a multimillionaire? Because Christian Grey is a typical waifu.
1) There are no male waifus. Married men are not wives, hence they're not waifus (Which is a Japanese accented way of saying wife). The male equivalent of a waifu is a husbando (The Japanese accented way of saying husband)
2) Christian Grey is not a husbando. In fact, he's actually an incredibly shitty character and person.
3) Fifty Shades of Grey became popular because it was a mainstream way of exploring the taboo regarding bondage (Which garners a lot of interest in the same way that BG3 got a lot of interest because of the taboo of "Bear Sex")
So yes, Larian quite badly failed to deliver male and female waifus in the game.
Given the sheer popularity of Shadowheart, Astarion, Karlach and Lae'zel... I don't think they did.
Just because YOU personally hate Shadowheart and Lae'zel and deem Karlach not attractive enough for your tastes, doesn't mean that Larian failed.
If I didn't have 150 hours in BG3
I'm very curious how you managed to get to 150 hours and only now suddenly are having issues with characters. How were you going through the game that you had 0 interactions with Lae'zel and Shadowheart? While seemingly not wanting to play with male companions or hirelings?
hirelings are freaks with Wither's voice - absolutely out of the question.
Hirelings only have Withers voice if you actively talk to them... Of which there's no purpose of doing outside dismissing them.
When you're normally playing, their generic call outs are made using regular player character voices.
