[2021] Why did Season 2 not have player character voice acting?

Everyone's pretty much covered it already. TL;DR - It was largely a technical constraint that we were solving during S2 production.

Long version/how the dev sausage is made: We stopped using cinematic conversations (the side-by-side cutscenes you see in the Personal Story) to do more in-world storytelling in Season 2. At the same time our engineering folks were upgrading our dialogue system during that time to allow for non-systemic player dialogue (a.k.a. character dialogue in scenes, not barks) during gameplay. That system wasn't ready until Heart of Thorns, so Season 2 didn't use any player voice since we couldn't trigger story dialogue outside of full cinematics during that time.

Extra spicy.

<3