In TW3 you still got skills and perks for leveling up, you got more complex and diverse as you leveled up. Enemies didn't get left in the dust in terms of health or damage with level scaling on, you just became a more skilled fighter or had more means at your availability.
Well, that's precisely why levels were pointless. You already got more powerful unlocking talents, plus you had a lot of gear to add to your capabilities.
What was the point to add even some stat scaling at each level on top of that? It didn't help the game in any way and if anything introduced only more problems in term of balance.
Now imagine:
- removing this sort of stat boost at level up and leaving in the game just the ability to unlock/spend talent points.
- dialing down the stat scaling on weapons as well. There's no need to start with a sword that deals 20-23 dmg and end the game with a sword capable of doing 475-600 dmg. An end game weapon doing 6X the initial damage at most would be more than enough.
- more "sidegrades" than upgrades: a lot of equipment could offer alternate-but-equivalent bonuses rather than just ramping up numbers at every chance (horizontal growth over vertical growth, so to say.)
You would now have a game that suffered far less from trivializing low level content, that wouldn't need any artificial scaling to solve the issue your system was creating in the first place, that would be inherently more suited for a non-linear approach to exploration and quest solving (while still having areas visibly tougher than others), etc, etc.
On top of that, you could also take the chance to make your world feel more "useful" and rewarding to explore in every small corner, with a couple of tricks:
- equipment, materials and herbs would now be more rare (if not even unique) but also more valuable, so you could encourage the player to explore that dark cave apparently pointless just to find that herb he needed for a powerful potion.
- displace around the map more "places of power" as reward for exploring some areas and defeating some monsters. These places of power would reward you with all the talent points you aren't getting anymore by merely leveling up.
In the end you'd have a game inherently more balanced, while still retaining a CLEAR sense of progression and the feeling you were getting stronger/more versatile over time.
Bonus point: inventory management would also be implicitly tuned down a lot. No more picking up shit every two literal steps in the game world, just to realize that the almost totality of it is literal vendor trash.