I still haven’t watched Bandersnatch itself, but a lot of this resonated with me (and is also why I haven’t bothered with Bandersnatch directly, I’ve played enough so far of the meta-meta-narrative).

To start from closer to end of your thoughts here, I think it’s greatly telling on a meta-meta-narrative level that Telltale’s own final budgeted project was a port of their post-Walking Dead Minecraft series to Netflix’s weird FMV CYOA engine here. An all ages romp where the choices don’t really matter but lots of clever “That character will remember that” moments transported from an aging Adventure Game engine mimicking one of the blandest graphics engines of all time converted into into wasteful 4K bandwidth videos and capable of only the barest of interactivity. It would almost be hilarious and ironic if it weren’t also so extremely real and stupid. (And I say that as someone that enjoyed the TT Minecraft seasons for what they were, and what they were was a strange Minecraft TV show with decent production values and an absurd illusion of choice. I have not played the Netflix port though and see no reason to.)

The one Netflix CYOA that I’ve played so far from beginning to multiple ends and across all its dead ends was the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt series finale/made-for-TV wrap up movie. It’s choices were also not of great importance and a lot of the things people say about Banderdsnatch were true about it. The joy of it was exploring the breadth of it for additional jokes (just as exploring the best of the dialog trees from LucasArts’ heyday) and even one of my favorite jokes came from the extremely meta-narrative point of finally hitting that ubiquitous Netflix “Skip Intro” button well into my fifth or sixth play through, despite mostly appreciating the Intro and just about never hitting that button in regular binge watches of shows.

I don’t know if you paid any attention to Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, it was a peculiar post-30 Rock leg stretch by Tina Fey/Robert Carlock at times incredibly witty and others incredibly bizarre. It still seems to me both entirely fitting and entirely ironic that of the projects Netflix forced to do CYOA projects (Bandersnatch, Minecraft, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, what a line up) it will be one of the most iconic to me.