I hear you on the “ten episode” bit. I HATE that that became standard. It’s some real garbage and has hurt a lot of different shows. The Last of Us was generally amazing, but suffered from rushing a bit. Without spoilers, there’s an episode where they expand on a minor gay character from the game, and the main characters aren’t in it much. The episode is amazing, and also got a ton of hate because the internet is awful, but one very valid critique is that in spending the entire episode in that wonderful little vignette, you had to rush beats of other episodes. That could have been fixed by simply having more episodes in the season.

Point is, somewhere shrinkflation hit our TV shows and I hate it lol.