Try to design and implement a game with choice and multiple paths one day - after a certain point, all the possible permutations just gets unwieldy. There's a reason a lot of Bioware games have a chokepoint -> open world -> chokepoint (repeat as needed) in its design, as a way of constraining having too many threads to track.
On top of that, remember that studios do draw upon past work. When a lot of players never encounter a lot of your game's optional content, at some point reality and budget says to do something different to make better use of your resources.
Not to mention, failing the whole game due to a bad choice in the middle of the story just isn't very fun, especially when you have the save/reload system that negates the failing choice.
And just because the response might not seem like you failed, you have no idea what sort of variables or flags are set behind the scenes. It just might not be apparent Right Now, but could have long term consequences.
