I wouldn't be surprised if, assuming anyone goes, that's the real reason for at least a third.

I'd expect them to. They'd be actively trying to make up the sudden labor shortfall, and even back then it meant a lot of business details recorded.

That's a really under-appreciated part of the Book of Exodus.

Content gets cut and they try to merge together details from different routes, leading to the show being crammed full of more than it can handle even with cut details. The best way around that is something like the Fate approach where you have multiple different works to handle different routes (sure it still has some issues but for the most part it at least works), but the problem is unless your name is something like Fate no one is going to spend that much money on you.

And on top of that you've got companies deciding "well we've got this fairly lengthy work we're adapting, so it gets maybe 13 episodes. That'll get the biggest fans spending on it while not really costing us much".

Not surprising that VN's aren't nearly as popular a choice for source these days.

Performance in the 1900s and 1910s isn't going to impact much analysis of them post-World War II.

For why:

1. Ability to raise pretty large armies.
2. After WWII they controlled (or at least had controlled by aligned governments who couldn't afford too much of a breach with them) a vast amount of land and its resources, much more of Europe than any Russian empire ever had.
3. A lot of nuclear weapons and the ability to deploy them at a lot of targets.
4. They had considerable ideological appeal to a lot of the world.
5. They did inflict a lot of casualties on Germans and their allies.

Now it's not as though failures didn't get noticed. In fact, Finland was so embarrassing that they weren't expected to put up a good defense against the Nazis. That they could push Germany back, even if it required a lot of logistical support from the US and came about alongside invasions of Italy and France, goes to show that a weak military doesn't necessarily stay that way if there are the right motivations and it has time to change.

On sale, probably. Don't expect the impactful choices the game presented itself as having outside of a couple times in the main story, and it's often shallow outside that main story, but beyond that it's a decent enough game.

Also PC means mods which, besides lots and lots of mods around boobs, means you can hopefully not have to deal with some of the game's BS (like arbitrary restrictions as to when you can get/equip gear).

Wilkinson's The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt is fairly accessible.

I wouldn't say it's a history source, though one can see a good deal of early 20th century xenophobia and racism (and occasionally sexism) in his works, The Shadow over Innsmouth and At the Mountains of Madness are good for this, particularly if one's reading the annotated version.

Edit

And yes, I will say that if one looks at the works past his disgust for people who weren't WASPs, there was still interesting stuff in there that would be a major influence on later horror, as well as societal fears about technology and what scientific discoveries meant for views of humanity. Just not one to read uncritically.