Almost physically painful to watch my wife play Baldur's Gate 3
She will run through fire, open herself up to opportunity attacks, and use up all her actions to send a squidgy mage into the middle of a battlefield. She says that strategy is boring. As a seasoned Xcom addict, I am dying.
She's right. Combat in RPGs is always a waste to get to the good stuff. Whether I whack an orc over the head with a mace or a sword is the least interesting choice one can make in how one interacts with the gameworld.
Unfortunately, 5E's class features and feats are very combat focused. Combine this with the fact that many of the abilities that are useful outside of combat in the ttrpg don't have the flexibility to be used like that in a video game and you reach a point where the only meaningful choices you can make are barely, if ever, related to the mechanical aspects of the character you create. The most mechanics come into play is with ability checks and the occasional revealed dialogue option.
TLDR: whether you help the deep gnomes rebel against their duregar slavers or help those slavers crack the whip is not meaningly changed if you're playing a half elf ranger as opposed to a dwarf fighter or whatever.