Completely agree with OP.
But given DOS2 design was the complete opposite (in part because you cannot backtrack and there are no random encounters), I have little hope we will see that in BG3.
I'm going to say that in D:OS2, the balance was literally designed under the assumption that you'd be doing all possible content in order to even keep up with the level curve, because I remember that even being 1 level below the enemy target basically resulted in what appears to be a -20% damage penalty to your attacks (and I think being above them in level conferred a similar damage bonus). Granted, this was in the vanilla version, I don't recall if the Definitive Edition scaled that back. It was possible to leave for Act 3 very early in D:OS2, but you were highly encouraged to do everything possible, or else you'd enter Act 3 being like 3 levels behind every enemy. And if you didn't have a save game back in Act 2, you might as well have restarted the game, because Act 3 surprisingly enough was not really designed for heavy cheese (overall lack of barrels, for one).
I would hope that this wouldn't be a problem in BG3 since it runs on entirely different damage calculations, but at the same time we're locked to level 4 and we don't know how enemies later in the game would be scaled.
I played the Definitive Edition and the level curve was very harsh. I would even say the game is pseudo-nonlinear given that you can only pick enemies one level above you which leads to a very linear pathway. Never really understood the praise for DOS2.
BG3 so far grants you some non-linearity, but if we are not backtracking I don't think Larian will include low level foes going forward.
