What I mean by that is that there is no such thing as "pure gameplay" or "pure story". What that would even mean?
Chess. Watching LP on YT, with non-relevant bits edited out.
What do I win?
You could easily strip all but pure gameplay from the game by defluffing and tokenizing it - replacing all sounds, graphics and text with completely abstract symbols and bare minimum information about expected branching.
This is actually what often happens during gameplay design:
You could just as easily strip out all but pure story by just watching the story relevant action and fluff without even the UI info.
This in turn is pretty much what often happens during storyboarding (and often yields crappy cRPGs).
Of course, doing this to a well designed game would indeed cripple both parts as they are designed to support each other, with the structure of the gameplay typing into the narrative it's purported to support in logical, consistent ways which leads us to...
...the situation where the different layers of the game tell different, mutually incompatible stories - which happens to be the point of this thread:
They create the story, the characters, the worlds - but only after these things they think about mechanics.
Actually that's not unacceptable. If you design vaguely realistic (which
can refer to pretty much any SF or fantasy as well, fuck you very much) story and setting, you might describe most of the stuff that happens (other than magic, which can still be decomposed into RL-ish consequences and your magic system which can in turn be derived from intended feel of the magic) in terms of RL analogues and only then build the actual mechanics for handling those without any problems (other than possibly time and resource management ones, because programming and assets might turn out to be the actual work(TM) part.
BW's problem is not that.
It's exactly them designing both parts in separation without considering how they should merge into game. And they are hardly alone in that - so does Larian, despite being much more competent studio making better and more competently designed games.
There is more than one way to fuck up your game via disconnect between mechanics and something else (including other mechanics), or any other inconsistency.
Gameplay and story, or crunch and fluff should be like accounting - both sides ultimately leading to the same result (telling the same story).
If they don't, you've fucked up.
tl;dr
We might actually be agreeing more than it would seem, but some things needed to be said.