See, this to me is what a lot of the grognard types, blinded by their miffed fury, are missing about the games. Because of that close attention to action speeds in particular,
they are much better RTwP games, they flow better than the massaged tabletop of the BG/IWD RTwP games (and even the Owlcat games today). And in some senses, once you get the initially odd-seeming stats ingrained in your mind, even quite good simulationist games (except in the sense that the old games allowed fail builds - analogous to, e.g., a klutzy thief irl - and these games are deliberately more egalitarian and try to avoid that possibility).
The whole detour into RTwP with the BG/IWD was an aberration in fact. Anything based on D&D type rules should
always have been turn-based, the way the rules were designed, that's their home. But once RTwP was invented, the possibility of developing game systems around that game mode opened up, and Sawyer tried to rethink it - and with POE2 pretty much succeeded.
I've come to really enjoy POE2 more each time I've played it. POE1 was okay (esp. the DLC) but for me is unbearable to play because of the hideous visual soup. But POE2 is a great game all-round. The fact that it "failed" (though note that because it's a huge game that's always there, its relative popularity has climbed steadily over the years, as non-drama-invested bored players eventually get around to trying it and like it - e.g. there's a steady flow of "Hey this is actually pretty good" YT vids) is not a reflection of its quality, but rather a reflection of the relatively small popularity of RPGs. Once the hardcore audience had given up on the series after the first game, there wasn't much of a natural audience left, and Larian had more or less soaked up whatever fringe normie audience CRPGs have with their surprise, innovative hit and its follow-up.
Big, popular CRPGs are like the saxophone hits of the gaming world, and as my ex. said about those, you're only allowed one per decade