Some of OP criticism could be dismissed as “it’s always like that”. There is limited amount of change that a campaign can do to accommodate players choices and that is expected. A lot of reactivity, urgency or danger is smoke & mirrors. I don’t think it is a bad thing, but it’s needs to be effective. I though D:OS2 did it really, really poorly (and to be fair I will point to PoE2 having really really bad reactivity to 1st PoE1 choices). The game doesn’t need to react to everything, but of it hints that something will have consequences and then it doesn’t, it sucks. Having a companion be a magic bomb puzzles me as an idea itself, though maybe it works better in game then on paper. Being an EA we might not know how thing will play out in 1.0, but big things like that tend to not work - would I want to have an NPC who will end the campaign if he is dead for too long?