Making smaller games isn’t a bad thing. Every game being a BG3 would be completely unsustainable. Sure, that game was a great accomplishment, but also imagine if they’d made the game that size and it was bad. It would’ve probably sunk the studio. I’m all about more A and AA games. Not everything needs to be a 300 person effort.
The back and forth on twitter/bluesky over this topic was pretty wide ranging, and size/cost definitely was a topic discussed. And besides a lot of the “quality” of BG3 was the fact that it supported endless paths through the game, something which requires a lot of development effort.