This is a pretty good analogy. You could start watching "Stranger Things" from season 3, and you'd figure everything out well enough to follow the story, but the character interactions would be much less meaningful and you'd miss out on a lot of background details that make the setting richer.
Playing the game, it was clear to me that they didn't have the whole story mapped out in detail from day one. Minor plot threads get dropped and some of the lore isn't 100% consistent. But that's also true of a lot of TV shows with continuing storylines. On the whole, the game does an impressive job tying a decade's worth of expansions together into a single coherent storyline where each part builds on what came before. It's definitely too much of a slow burn in the beginning, but the setup eventually pays off and it's one of my favorite stories in all of gaming. Skipping to the last chapter would rob it of a lot of its impact.