Agreed, voice acting used in a way that doesn't limit the scope of the game can work really well. I know it's hardly a video game but Danganronpa is a great example of this (and many other VNs too).
For the most part, each line of dialogue is not voiced but it is accompanied by a short quip that finishes playing at about the time it takes for you to finish reading it. A sentence-long apology from a character is accompanied by a quick "Sorry!" or sometimes just short grunts or miniature lines are used. What this does is convey the tone of the character speaking as well as their voice in a way that lets you take it at your own pace and allows the developers to only record ~100 lines at most for every type of sentence then repeat them a bunch. They also match the sprites of the characters to additionally help convey what they're saying in a way that can be reused as much as necessary.
Also you don't even need good voice actors for this if you don't intend to do any full lines. Danganronpa hires relatively fancy Japanese actors since the class trials are fully voiced (otherwise it'd be pretty hard to see what everyone's saying since lines fly across the screen or go upside down). You could just grab someone off the street (or the dev team) to grunt into the microphone a bunch of times and get everything you need.
I'd absolutely love to see a big RPG take this approach to dialogue since it's a very nice middle ground between something like Morrowind and "muh cinematic full voice acting"
