I quite like Chris Davies, he doesn't always have the most jovial tone when he's speaking, but overall he has a good balance of time spent on the different aspects of a game. Well done.
I played the first PoE briefly, ran out of spare time to play, and years later I directly played the 2nd then ran out of motivation, other occupations were more appealing to me. I've recently restarted playing it.
I feel many of the reviewer's comments apply to the PoE 2 too. Too much lore and vocabulary is thrown at the player by each NPC, the ruleset is convoluted and hard to get into, the areas are beautifully handcrafted but the loading screens way too numerous and very slow (even on high-end systems with NVMe), the quests and story are very good. The one difference is the "seriousness" he mentions, that I don't feel in the 2nd game, or at least it's not oppressing. Companions and other significant NPCs feel real and are interesting as far as I saw.
It's easy to like this game despite its problems.
What he says about the cut scenes replaced by sketches / dialogue-like pages made me think of the problem with Solasta. They should really have taken this approach, it's not distracting from the tabletop feeling, it offers more branches with less work, and the presentation would have been much better. They used that in Pathfinder games too, and it works very well.
The "named NPC" issue is a comment I'd just made about Monomyth, I'm not surprised it turned out badly. They haven't made the same mistakes in PoE 2 AFAIK.