I'm obviously not following the thread from start to finish. I'm using the example games given by your inital post. You can't expect people to read every single one of your post in which you had to explain your point further because you didn't formulate it correctly.
You named WoW, which doesn't have many cutscenes, neither now nor back then, to begin with and I used the scripted-event storytelling they mostly use as an example on how bad it looks in comparison and how awful they feel to me when I'm looking at them or rather "play" (playing in this case is me doing nothing, so basically "suffer") through them.
I'm saying that cutscenes can be used for everything and do a better job than that mess. I'm looking at what games can do to tell a story and there are limits. And I don't want to look at these limitations and think about how poorly they are done, I'd rather see a cutscene that is done in a good way. That has my character/soldier as an active part and look and act realistic in that situation.
There is literally no sane man that would prefer a seeing Kyrian grabbing you by the neck over a cutscene like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-ZILF_H8Iw - it doesn't matter if it was an important part of the story, it's strictly just better.
The witcher has like 12 hours or so of cutscenes. Most of them are just 2 people talking to each other, but it's still much better because the camera angle, the facial animations, the gestures are pre-set and can't (or shouldn't, if it's bug-free) be messed up by unplanned movement and other stuff. They can have characters move around during those, they can do way more this way than they could ever hope to do otherwise.
edit: You also mention "storytelling through gameplay" which is a huge buzz-word but not much more. That thing is very difficult.
You gave D2 as an example for that in your second post. All I can say to this is "what the fuck?".
Either way these are my 2 cents. I'm not going to change any minds either way.