Although I agree with literally everything you said, Tigranes, and what you described relates well to the experience of many players, that's not exactly the issue I personally find most interesting.
You're looking at AOD from the "difficulty" perspective: aka, someone arguing that
"the game seems/feels linear because everything I want to do I fail, because the margin of success is very small when compared to other RPGs, so I need to follow a predetermined path." And yeah, I see that in some comments. But what makes AOD seem more stiff than other RPGs to me is not its difficulty, but the lack of interaction between systems. Or in a way, perhaps the complete absence of systems, since they are all integrated within the game's dialogue system.
It's worth saying that here I'm using the word "system" as a specific set of mechanics that a game presents that allows you to interact with the game environment in a direct way with a specific goal.
For example, in Fallout we have several systems. There is a turn-based combat system. There is a dialogue system. There is a system of characters and attributes. There is a skill system (which is subdivided into some others, in particular stealth and theft). These systems interact with each other, obviously, but an important feature of every system is that it is something global - essentially, it is present in the whole game, even if it is not useful or used in the whole game. It makes itself organically present in the design of every aspect of the game.
For example, Fallout has a dialog system, but it doesn't necessarily mean that you'll be able to dialog with any object in the map, or convince a rat not to attack you. But it does mean that the game does not place arbitrary limits on where the system will be used. You can try to start a dialogue with any NPC, even if some don't answer anything but a sentence. It's the same with the skills system, you can activate stealth in any scenario of the game, even if there are no entities around you that can react to it. You can place traps, even if there's no one around. The main point here is to realize that when the game offers a systemic approach, all the objects in the game are programmed with these systems in mind.
And this is where the big difference in AOD comes in. Here, most skills do not exist as a separate system, they are integrated directly into combat and dialogue systems. (Crafting/alchemy being the exceptions.) That means you don't have the freedom to use the skill you want, wherever you want (even if uselessly, without result). The basic example is that you can have the steal skill, but you can't steal from any NPC in the game world, only the specific NPCs within the dialog system where VD decided that this skill could be used. The same with traps, you cannot produce and put traps in the environment where you want trying to, for example, attract an enemy to it. You only "use" your traps skill within the dialog system where the game has determined that traps exist. Same with stealth, and so on.
So the problem is not the difficulty itself. You could pick Fallout, increase the difficulty by 300% and up the requirement of all the checks in the game, forcing the player to create an extremely specific build to be able to meet the conditions of certain quests or certain goals - and still, Fallout would still essentially be a very different game from AOD by the way its systems interact with the game world. It's not a difference in the difficulty of the game, it's a difference in design. Which doesn't mean there isn't a difference in difficulty either, obviously. In a way, one is a consequence of the other in this particular case, but one does not imply the other.
You may have an extremely difficult game with an approach that uses several systems to interact with the game world, or an extremely easy game but with limited scope. Even if you divide by 2 the difficulty of all the AOD checks, it still remains "linear" game in that way. To make it clear, I think the approach VD used in AOD was smart, taking into consideration the team he had. This obviously allowed him to have a greater focus and to explore a lot of the choices and consequences and branching paths which was, and still is, his focus. In that sense, he has really succeeded, and offers with AOD something that few other games (if any) can offer. On the other hand, to achieve this, he decided to "sacrifice" the existence of more systems within the game, which causes this claustrophobic effect for some people.
Maybe if he had a team of 15 or 20 talented people, who knows? It is what it is. I don't think it's very productive to complain about the game for something it's not and never set out to be, but I think it's important to understand and acknowledge the difference. To sum it all up as a matter of "git gud" is to fail to see that.