Played around 80h of Early Access and I even bought the old games and played through them before release to catch up on the world. I enjoy Baldur’s Gate 3’s combat a lot more, but that’s mainly because I loathe real-time-with-pause combat and only suffered through it in Baldur’s Gate, Pillars of Eternity and Planescape:Torment because the story and characters grabbed me enough to keep going. The game is very different and makes many changes from PnP DND ruleset, and has many “Larianisms” (spells causing surfaces, water making you weaker to lightning/cold but resistant to fire height giving advantage/disadvantage to attacks) but none of them detract from the experience. If you’re not a D&D purists you will probably enjoy it after some getting used to it. As for the story and characters, it’s hard to say much as we only had access to the small portion that is (not even the entirety of) Act 1 during Early Access, but what’s there has been incredible.
In short, it’s not like the old games, but I think considering it’s been 23 years since the last game and this one is developed by an entirely different studio, it would be incredibly unfair to judge it based on that.