What's genuinely weird to me is that it's becoming more and more common despise being inherently a poor fit for any non linear and/or open world game and despise the better examples already existing for YEARS.
You don't really need a constant escalation of numbers across a single player campaign, you don't need to see "level counters" that keep ramping up, and if anything they can even become comically immersion breaking, when you are facing the "White Hunt Emissary" or the "Giant Golem of Destruction" at level 6 and 20 hours later those level 43 street thugs.
While a sense of progression is welcomed, it's perfectly fine to have just a marginal growth from the beginning to the end, to have equipment upgrades as sparse (BUT REWARDING) episodes and to leave the gap between early game and end game relatively contained.
I don't think you'll ever hear a single mentally healthy person claiming "Man, without these random swords looted every five minutes TW3 would feel a game so stingy of exciting rewards!"
They did't even realize that by making loot so comically common they also robbed themselves of the ability to make treasure chests something worth tracking, etc, etc.
The same was true even beyond equipment in TW3. Imagine if rare materials for crafting and rare plants for potions were things you had to track down in dangerous corners of the world rather than something you could just constantly get randomly at every single step, in industrial quantities.