Larian has had several massively successful Kickstarter campaigns and releases in the genre, proving those concerns wrong again and again. If a developer really wanted to make a great CRPG in all those years, nothing was stopping them. Clearly they weren’t interested enough in it. Of course many of them will now jump on the huge hype train of BG3 and claim they‘ve always been oh so faithful.
That is not to say Publishers aren‘t also to blame of course. It‘s a bit tragic that BG3 was only even possible to become such an elaborate project with a huge investment from Tencent. And I can‘t speak for Larian of course but I don‘t think that was their first choice going by how secretive they‘ve been about Tencent‘s involvement.
But yeah if any dev from Bioware or Obsidian now claims they considered to make a massively huge CRPG like BG3 or anything comparable. As in actually bringing it up during a meeting with execs only to be shut down. I‘d have to call them big fat liars.