I posted this in a reply to one of your other messages but fuck it, it makes more sense as a full reblog/response
I feel like at least based on my experience, there's three different kinds of visual novels (or interactive fiction in general), with different end goals. These aren't all mutually exclusive, but VNs tend to prioritize different goals. (This is also divorced from genre - these can all be romance, or horror, or puzzle game, whatever)
There's the 'self-expression' style of visual novel - think Arcade Spirits, Our Life, etc. The choices available are more for your ability to say "This is me/my character, they are a unique and special snowflake". The purpose of playing is to get you to think about how you/your character to react.
This is my jam.
Secondly, there's "Choices Matter" style of visual novel - I'm thinking of Scarlet Hollow here as the best example of this - so many little things could change based on little choices, not even counting the big end-of-episode ones. A lot of games in the "Self-Expression" bucket also pursue this goal, but one is not prerequisite of another - actually, this is better represented by CRPGs like Fallout or Disco Elysium. The idea behind this is you want to know that your actions affected the world around you - that if you hadn't made the decisions you'd made, the world would be a different place. It's the sort of game where your first playthrough feels like uniquely 'yours'.
You know the Fallout-style ending slide show? If you're expecting one at the end, it's one of those.
This is also my jam.
Thirdly, there's 'exploration' style visual novels. These ones don't require choices, though they can be present - rather, the goal of this visual novel is to explore something - usually who a character is, be it the love interest(s) or the player character or something else (though this is genre-dependent - a mystery VN is more about exploring the mystery). These are, if not kinetic, usually defined by specific 'routes' (think Fate Stay Night, or Slay the Princess), where the intent is that a completionist might see multiple routes to get the full picture - though these can also be kinetic novels. The point is that player freedom isn't the goal - the goal is experiencing the story, learning about the characters, etc., and the choices are more about 'what do you want to read _now_' than 'what would you/your character do' or 'what's the best decision to make'.
This is also also my jam, but less so than the other two.
Most visual novels I feel are 'exploration' style. 'Self-Expression' tends to be rare - most visual novels have a fixed character protagonist, or the protagonist is very limited in how they can self-express. 'Choices Matter' tend to be even more rare, and are usually just 'exploration' with multiple routes to follow.
That said, this isn't a value judgement. I love Fate/Stay Night and Tsukihime and other visual novels, I wouldn't be buying them if I didn't. I've read several 'choices matter' choice-of-games that suuuck but the choices undeniably matter. There are valid criticisms you could make of solely self-expressive games, that there's only an illusion of choice and no matter what you do you'll still go through the exact same situations, and that no matter how you 'roleplay' nothing actually changes (though of course that isn't the goal of these styles of games. The 'style' doesn't say anything about how good the game is.
I do think there's a hierarchy of difficulty though. The reason exploration-style games are more common is because it's essentially a simple flowchart of a novel. It's easier to write, the writers need to take fewer choices into account - and so each route can be its own novel. If you go with self-expression, you have to provide a lot of decisions and provide some sort of feedback, even if that feedback isn't plot-breaking (In Our Life, your decisions can change your 'personality' but there's like three decisions that change the _events of the story, and even then only in minor ways). And with Choices Matter - uh, there's a reason these aren't usually visual novels.
Also I mentioned this at the beginning but it's important to emphasize that visual novels aren't exclusively one of these - Lots of 'exploration' based visual novels have a few trivial choices just to get the PC to engage and think about how they'd react; lots of 'self expression' style games have _some_ choices that do in fact matter, like 'who do I date'. The difference between Choices Matter and Exploration might be just a matter of degrees of decisions - you could argue that Scarlet Hollow is ultimately a flowchart of decisions and isn't meaningfully different from a VN like Fate Stay Night. I'd disagree, if only because of how much you can change your relationship with Tabitha based on little choices.