Ever heard the term esoteric or auteur?
If you want gameplay try some other game. You are asking David Lynch to become Christopher Nolan. People are fan of Kojima not regardless of the things you described but exactly because of those reasons.
In fact I'm one of the people who though gameplay was dragging down the experience and went to YouTube for the codec conversations and hours worth cutscenes.
Which is a perfect 10 game for me. It's a 90min walking simulator about a person narrating and guiding the player through esoterically designed video game levels. It's from the guy behind The Stanley Parable.Not everything needs to fit your neat little packaged product. I recommend you play https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beginner's_Guide
All your Memes and and referenced articles made me love and get hyped about Death Stranding even more. Your post is practically promotional material in my eyes.
By skipping the gameplay (by your own admission) then you are admitting that his games weren't that groundbreaking to begin with.
I'm personally not into stealth. That doesn't mean Kojima wasn't groundbreaking. The guy invented both stealth and cutscene heavy serious storytelling in video games. Inventing a genre sounds groundbreaking to me.
He did not invent the stealth genre unfortunately, that was Manbiki Shounen (Shoplifting Boy). Other games also improved the genre including Castle Wolfenstein, Infiltrator and the grand father of all of them Tenchu: Stealth Assassins. Those pre-date his games by years and months.
Wolfenstein 3D has been called the "grandfather of 3D shooters" but it was the 3rd FPS from id Software. I guess people only remember things starting from the first killer app. There have been digital currencies before Bitcoin, but none really took off.
The Stanley Parable is a game changer 🤓😎. Pun intended...?