I totally agree, but when you mentioned the Choose Your Own Adventures books I became curious. I was a huge fan of these and other play books in the 80s and wondered if I could find a plot branch. These books were fun, but they were immensly simple tailored, to be fair.
A quick google gave me The Cave Of Time. All adventures you experience outside the "main" plot in this book usually leads the reader very quickly to some kind of ending. So, even if it is a lot easier to do branching, just needing to write it down (no programming, modelling, blabla involved), they still pretty much always stuck to a very simple trackline.
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