For me, one of the reasons Baldur's Gate 3 stands out from the crowd so much is that Larian have done something that other studios/publishers have consistently failed to do in recent years: released a polished product at launch. Of course there are bugs and issues to be found and addressed after launch - something I'm sure that many denizens of this site are familiar with - but on the whole it was a very well-polished game when it launched. Larian made excellent use of the "early access" period, using it to address many game-breaking bugs, much-needed balance changes, and incorporating the feedback of fans.
If you compare to just a handful of "big" releases on PC over the last couple of years... Cyberpunk 2077: 'nuff said. It ran fairly well if you had a spankingly high-end machine, but there were still major issues & bugs in the game and it's taken nearly 3 years to get it to what it arguably should have been at launch (DLC aside). Starfield has utterly dire performance on all but high-end PCs, and it's full of the same bugs and jankiness we've come to know and hate from Bethesda games. Rarely do I experience "game-breaking" bugs that cannot be recovered from, but I had several while playing Starfield; each required either losing dozens of hours of gameplay, or in some cases a complete re-start. Jedi Survivor continues to experience poor performance and image quality to this day, with frame-pacing issues being present on even the top-end hardware. Cities Skylines 2 struggles even on a 14900K or 7950X3D and an RTX 4090 - in fact some of its graphics settings were completely borked, having the exact opposite effect to what you'd expect.
I had this discussion elsewhere recently and, at its most basic level, Baldur's Gate 3 offers as much freedom and flexibility as old school text-based RPGs from decades past. But in the case of Baldur's Gate 3, it's far greater than the sum of its parts in my (not-so) humble opinion. All the core elements - animations, graphics, core gameplay mechanics, voice acting, scripting/writing, etc - are done extremely well in their own right, and they're brought together into a final product that's extremely well polished. Larian continues to put a lot of time and effort into fixing bugs and incorporating fan feedback. They even made the imp "Bing Bong" canon within the game (Context: "Bing Bong" was a character beloved by (at least some of) the party in the tabletop session that the BG3 voice actors did with High Rollers Dnd. His sole purpose was to open the door for prospective customers of a shop while yelling "BING BONG!").
Arguably no one but Larian Studios could accomplish such a massive and in-depth game, given their pedigree in D&D/RPGs, and it shouldn't necessarily be held up as a "standard" that all games should live up to. But it's a fantastic game that deserves the praise it gets.
Although I do wish the performance was a little better on Steam Deck! It's OK for the most part, hovering around 30-40fps (which is fine for this game), but there are points where it tanks right down to 10-15fps. No amount of graphics twiddling, short of making it a blurry mess, can improve it sadly.