I would like to see the persimmon tree.

As for the feature of companions in BG3, I think it's because of the ability to play as them as main characters, so that there is additional interest for the player (it's not a fact that everyone needs it).

I also never liked this about Larian. Instead of putting more effort into the custom character branch, they put the main effort into the pre-made character branches, which simply have more content. Gale stands out again in this regard, as he has a lot of unique wizard abilities for role-playing that are not available to a simple wizard. He will always be a more magical wizard. Sometimes it gets to the point of being funny, where a necromancer player can't even trigger the quest with the necromantic ritual without Gale and can only perform the ritual if they pass a very difficult arcana check (which they will most likely only be able to pass with a critical success on the dice). Gale passes it automatically. :)
At least Durge is here this time. In the future, I would like them to focus on these custom origins instead of "oh, you can play as a companion."

And I didn't really like this trend in Mask of the Betrayer 2.

But I like Mask, actually. And it made more sense there. But I already wrote to someone in a private message about the presence of a number of unintentional similarities between BG3 and Mask in certain plot points. And many of the moments in Mask are implemented better. It's even a little awkward to compare Mirkul from BG3 with Mirkul from Mask.

To some extent... there wasn't anything like that in Divine, I didn't finish the first OS, and I didn't play the second.

I felt the love for self-repetition and the tendency to merge characters from the second Divine (not the original sin). Since then, I haven't really expected much from Larian in these aspects. I didn't even touch their games for a long time, but I gave them a chance and tried Dragon Commander. I was disappointed again and stayed away from them until the release of the second original sin. :)