You rushed...Yes I think its definitely one of those spiral games. If it hooks you and you get into it its more rewarding but if it doesn't you end up with an experience like mine.
Did you miss the fridge?
I took my time with it and really enjoyed reading documents and thinking about the world. If the game didn't hook you early on, I can only imagine how horrible most of it was.
Will need to pull out my play notes to see if I agreed with you on some of the combat things.
I started the fridge thing but died to the boss first time and couldn't be bothered to try again. The boss knocked a part of the floor away near the edge of the map and I didn't have the floor on my screen so I didn't realise that there was no floor anymore and yeah... When I just straight up died and had to wait a minute to respawn again I though well fudge that and moved on.
Basically a good summary of a lot of my experience with the game.
I think after about main mission 3 or 4 I didn't bother with a single side mission, I was already fed up. Edit: it was after one of those pop up timed missions. I went through a minute load screen to teleport to the place it was telling me to go and then made my way from the control point, the game lagged to hell and I died and apparently failed the mission. Took a minute to respawn and then a minute to travel back to where I was. After that I was like holy shame this game is just wasting so much of my time and decided not to do any side shame after that. The fridge was an exception because it was easy to start and I wa intrigued. I thought it was pretty dumb anyway.