After eight hours of playing:
+Good combat
+ Many ways to reach places
+Allowing to set custom class markers
+I like the look of the game environments. Divinity OS2 on steroids
+Lots of secrets
-UI looks like MMO junk
-Companion writing has been worse than previous Larian games
-I son't really care much about characters
-Lacks D&D feel/mood
-You can hear reused samples from the DOS osts. I'm a fan of those, but this is BG
Overall, I like exploration and combat, writing is meh. Too early to say anything about itemization, haven't gotten much yet. I'm now at level 3, doing stuff in the dungeon below the ruins.
Good encapsulation. Yeah this is pretty much how I'm seeing it now, after having good initial first impressions then absolutely hating the stupid luxury camp and Larian constantly pushing you into some kind of globohomogayplex mass orgy in the camp dialogues; now after playing some more I'm warming to it again.
Whatever else you might say about the game, the exploration and combat
are good. Bumping up to Tactician also hits a sweet spot - it could stand with being a bit more difficult even than that, but at least Tactician does force you to
occasionally look at all your options and problem-solve.
I'd even be slightly more positive about the characters than you - as someone said above, say with Astarion, you think you're going to hate him, and you do at first, but then he kind of grows on you as a complex personality. On the other hand Shadowtits is as dull as dishwater. And so on and so forth.
It's a game of two halves really, there's a decent-enough exploration and combat game, with mostly dull-to-average, but occasionally surprisingly good writing, characterization and voice acting, and then there's like this woketard Loverslab Lite trash tangled up with it. Reactivity is also inconsistent - again, sometimes it surprises you in interesting ways, but a lot of the time the vaunted reactivity is AWOL. It's a bit of a roller-coaster experience.
I'd also agree with what you say about it not feeling like D&D, and what someone else said above: it never
really feels like a Baldur's Gate game, it's still relentlessly Larianesque throughout (and too influenced by late-stage BioWare as well). It only has a faint dusting of D&D, mainly just because there are so many fucking Tieflings floating about (I guess because modern degenerates find Tieflings schmexy or something).