I think it's not really "choice" that the original BG games were superior at. I think it was "immersion".
As the above poster notes, none of the BG games have been super great at "choice", when it comes to the narrative. In the end, it usually boils down to:
1. The fleshed out "good" way to do things 2. The underdeveloped "evil" way to do things 3. A few endings and their slight variations.
This is...actually exactly the way it is in BG3, too. Where BG3 does a bit better is in how players can *choose* to solve different quests....but even on that front it's not like, mind-blowing or anything. For the most part, it's you discovering the unique solutions the devs hand-coded into the game. It's rarely "emergent", as in, coming up with a unique solution the devs didn't think of utilizing the mechanics of the game.
Where the originals really outshine BG3 (at least for me) is in the immersion aspect: The world feels, at least, much more broad and lived-in, the characters you meet feel much more like they have their own depth. BG3, a lot of the time, really does feel like you're seeing just the tiny slice of the world necessary for the game. And I don't know what it was...I think maybe partially the character writing (some of the companions in BG3 are good, some of them have awful writing imo), maybe partially the really garbled plot, but I never really felt able to get lost in BG3's world the way I could be immersed in the worlds of the original. I think the GAMEPLAY of BG3 really hooked me (at least until the combat becomes trivially easy), but the world and the characters never really did.
