People seem to be forgetting that "AA" game devs companies are an established "category" in video gaming. I wouldn't have considered the Divinity series from the same devs to be indie back when it came out.
Indie to me means a SMALL team (less than 20 total) selling something that is primarily a passion project, and not controlled by a larger entity. IE Minecraft stopped being indie when it was bought by Microsoft even though the team didn't get very large.
Censorship doesn't only mean removing content after the fact.
Could also be 'don't do that because 8% of our target market wouldn't like it' during early development or in non public versions. Or silly image stuff like car manufacturers not allowing their licensed cars to show damage in racing games.
Last one is blatantly obvious, the first one, you'll never know about it because it was internal.
Without any evidence to suggest otherwise, it's just baseless conspiracy theory to think some "shadow figure" was secretly pulling the strings to make their preferred evil-capitalist-ideal version of BG3 (lol).
BG3 is indie because they financed the game with money they raised themselves and self-published. It's that simple.
