OK, so I didn't play 4e, but a large part of that is because the first books made it clear (to me) it was very much a combat game. It looked like they removed nearly everything that wasn't combat-oriented. For instance: bards, (many) utility spells, good-aligned monsters.
Meanwhile if you go by actual play in vaguely skilled hands 4e had in many ways the strongest non-combat game of any D&D edition unless you were into gritty dungeon crawling. "I cast a spell to solve the problem" just uses a button to take you closer to the combat.
And 4e has the only set of core mechanics for a task that takes longer than a single skill check that doesn't involve beating someone up. Were skill challenges broken to the point of being barely functional out of the gate? Yes. Did they get fixed in errata? Also yes. Are 4e Skill Challenges as good as Daggerheart clocks? No - but Daggerheart took them from Blades in the Dark (2016) which iterated on Apocalypse World (2010). 4e had to completely adapt it from of all things a primarily complex lock picking thing in one of 3.5's splat books.
The biggest problem with 4e is that it was given 2 years from project start to out of the door - already too little time. Then 10 months in they scrapped what they had, making the Bo9S and the 4e Condition Tracks out of the good parts and went right back to the drawing board. And they still released to the corporate timescale set by the suits. It took about a year's worth of patches/errata before it reached where it ought to have been at launch and you never get a second chance to make a first impression.
I know bards and at least some good monsters came in a later, and they probably added more social elements in later as well, but that lack turned me off enormously.
4e right at launch had a fully formed skill system and a class with a strong social element (Warlord). Meanwhile due to the numbers involved the social skills could be taken by anyone; the skill spread was far less extreme and rogues didn't have all their skill points eaten by there being far too many skills. Which meant everyone could contribute much better rather than having one "social monopolist".
(Bards showed up after a year as the best version there has ever been, coming strong out of the gate by introducing the world to Vicious Mockery which, partly because it wasn't an explicit spell, IME always got roleplayed when it only sometimes is in the much less liminal 5e).
The main thing it was missing was mind control magic - which I suppose can be considered a "social element" although I'd have said it was more antisocial.
I may have liked the edition enough to buy it if they had included these things right away. (Or maybe not, because I can't get myself that excited for tactical combat.)
Now that's fair. 4e is IMO the best out of combat D&D for anything other than dungeon crawling and things better done in solo games like crafting - but the differences are incremental while it deservedly sold itself on the near revolutionary tactical combat.
Whereas DH includes social elements throughout the book, to the point that the Blade domain--probably one of the most combat-oriented domains used in the most combat-oriented classes--has the Soldier's Bond card. You say nice things to someone or ask them about themselves and you both gain Hope. I know the 4e fighter or warlord or whatever could basically point to someone and give them hp back, but the DH ability is specifically built to encourage roleplaying.
And it was built to encourage roleplaying by building on what 4e had done before with powers like the Warlord's powers Powerful Warning or Rub Some Dirt On It to pick the first two that come to mind. Both of which did encourage roleplaying.
Does Soldier's Bond do it more obviously and better? Yes. But it does it because it iterates on the path 4e opened up and that other editions of D&D barely touch.
And there's a whole Social adversary type, made specifically for non-combat encounters. (I have absolutely no idea how non-combat NPCs were handled in 4e.)
Same way you do in 5e. You decide what they should be able to do and write that down and if they need combat stats make them a minion. (It's only 3.X that's an outlier here where you need high level commoners).
Or you give them no stats at all and use skill challenge rules. And with skill challenges 4e was the only version of D&D to emphasise anything but combat or robbery (or behaving as a class stereotype for 2e) enough to give it strong explicit XP benchmarks
So while yeah, DH was definitely took heavily from 4e, it has enough social elements that people like me can really enjoy it.
More accurately (assuming you don't hate all versions of D&D) Daggerheart has vastly better polish and presentation and was allowed enough time in development.
