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If you have no points in any weapon styles:
If you use a katana, or mace, or any one handed weapon + a shield you are better with the shield than without it.
If you have points in single weapon style:
That gives you certain bonuses for only having a single one-handed weapon equipped. If you have a shield you lose those bonuses. Whether those bonuses are better than the shield properties is up to you.
If you have points in dual wield:
You lose the weapon in your second hand. And whatever bonuses and penalties (depending on how many points you have in dual wield you might be getting the extra attack but a penalty to your primary attack thac0). Again, up to you if the tradeoff for the shield bonuses is worth it.
Shield style only gives you AC against missiles. Even if you're using shields I'd largely consider it not necessary. However it will not hurt you at all to specialize in sword and board, and in some situations you'll be damn near untouchable as a result of it.
The two handed Axe in this game is called a halberd. As I recall the Original AD&D did not actually have a great axe. What it had was rules for using normal one handed weapons with two hands. The Actuale two handed axe became official with D&D 3.0.
Attempt to look smart and make me look dumb with wikipedia: FAILED
A halberd (also called halbard, halbert or Swiss voulge) is a TWO-HANDED pole weapon that came to prominent use during the 14th and 15th centuries. The word halberd may come from the German words Halm (staff), and Barte (axe). In modern-day German, the weapon is called a Hellebarde. The halberd consists of an AXE BLADE topped with a spike mounted on a long shaft. It always has a hook or thorn on the back side of the axe blade for grappling mounted combatants.[1] It is very similar to certain forms of the voulge in design and usage. The halberd was usually 1.5 to 1.8 metres (5 to 6 feet) long.[2]*
* information taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halberd. They even have pictures showing the axe head.
In AD&D, which is what Baldurs Gate's rules are based on; the halberd is the only two handed axe in the game. In the original table top rules there was a way to calculate the damage if you where using a one handed wepon with two hands.
As for the discussion on the shield style....
With many bad guys in the game useing ranged weapons it is alway a good tactic to have at least two members in you party with the shield style. Getting killed by a pair of kolbolds during your advance on there position really really sucks. The tactic I use against these types is to hold back my main melee (Minsc) and advance my shield duo (Jaheira and Khalid). Once my shields engages the bad guys I unleash my main melee while my ranged compainions rains pain on them. Depending on how tough the battle is I will either use my bard song (I play a Skald, ( Skalds Song: 1st Level: grants allies a +2 bonus to hit and damage rolls, and a -2 bonus to AC. 15th Level: grants allies a +4 bonus to hit and damage rolls, a -4 bonus to AC, and immunity to fear. 20th Level: grants allies a +4 bonus to hit and damage rolls, a -4 bonus to AC, and immunity to fear, stun, and confusion.) or join in the attack.
By your logic spears are just quarterstaves with a pointy knob on it and served the same purpose.
While mechanically the 2nd edition great axe is nearly identical to a halberd, the great axe has less required strength 10 vs 13 (IWD1 includes great-axes, but they're lumped into the axe proficiency instead of a seperate proficiency), and is part of the axe and hafted blade near/broad groups, where as the halberd is part of the spear and polearm near/broad groups.
This means despite the similarties in mechanical function, being proficienct in a Halberd would not give you the near familarity penalty reduction for using a 2hd axe without proficiency (near familarity halves the non-proficiency penalty if the weapons are part of the same Near group), but being proficient in 1hd axes would.
Though BG doesn't bother with that and simply gave all warriors near familarity with all weapons, so they only suffer a -1 penalty for non-proficiency instead of the -2 they're supposed to have. And the other classes get the full penalty no matter what.
(another area BG waffles on is the 2hd Hammers....BG has several of them, but they aren't properly 2hded and just use the regular hammer proficiency. Any warhammer in-game with a base damage of 2d4+1 is supposed to be a 2hded hammer, but since they didn't bother to add an animation for 2hd hammers, they just made them all 1hded).
Middle ages spearmen: ditto. It was often the only form of armor they had. It's one reason that, although there are lots of really cool spears in the game I never use them. Just look at the duel between Hector and Achilles in "Troy" to see that the spear was a ONE handed weapon, that COULD be used with both hands.
the difference is a short spear deals 1d6 damage instead of 1d8 and doesn't have reach (as with most things, it was just a corner cutting measure so that they didn't need another animation, same reason mauls are lumped into Warhammers).
BG1 vanilla, didn't have specific proficiencies, it let you get near groups (or a few broad groups) instead of proper proficiencies. Spears and Halberds are part of the same near group so they count as being proficient.
Though that said, it wasn't entirely wrong because you actually can purchase proficiency in near and broad groups, but BG1 treated them like normal proficiencies in regard to pip costs and specialization.
In actual PnP, purchasing a near group costs 2 pips, and a broad group costs 3 pips. And unlike BG1's example, you cannot specialize a weapon group.
If you have broad group Large Swords and wanted to specialize in longsword, you'd have to buy longsword proficiency specifically for 1 pip, and then another per point of specialization, even though you technically already had proficiency with the whole broad group, but you on average get proficiency in 5-7 weapons, so 3 proficiency for 5-7 weapons without penalty is a decent trade, especially if you don't know what sorts of weapons you may find.
Or for people to not just wear full plate even if it will disable their spells, because it beats being squished sometimes (especially low levels).
Or you know, all the random hardcoded "NO"s that exist.