But is it that branched? And, even if so, is it more branched that it previously was? OK... From ep. 1 to 3, it was more or less linear, but, episode 4, for instance, there are some common scenes but almost half of it is branched in 3 -- Sage, Derek, and Bella paths. Than, from ep. 5 onwards, there was already a Maya & Josy branch separated from the rest (at least for me, who was playing the others, but it's, at least, a double branch). There were also scenes that, even if you could get them in the same path, you have to play twice because they were mutually exclusive -- like sick Sage/Jill's date. Even when the scenes were not branched, there were always moments alone with a single girl, like, the Sage moment, the Jill moment, and so on; the difference now is you have to play the game 5 times to get all the scenes.
This "branching" in the episode 8 was an illusion; another master trick of the great psychologist Mr. DPC to have an excuse for increased development time. Take ep. 4, for instance: it was developed in ~4 months. OK, it has almost half of renders and animations of newer episodes, but, doing a gross calculation, newer episodes could be developed in 8 months.
And the newer episodes are not that complex compared to the complexity of the past. Take ep. 9, for instance, an endless freeroam with flashbacks with minor variations. Then, in each path, you have some moment with your loved one -- oh, my god! This is so complex! But it's not. The difference, in the past, is you could do all the scenes in the same freeroam -- or not, because it was already branched! So, nothing changed except for a subjective psychological illusion that things are more complex now than in the past (and a change in development time, of course...).
(And, no, I won't do a map of all the branching since ep. 1 to prove my theory... Everyone believes what everyone wants to believe... That's what I believe. Of course, there's an increase in complexity *in every game* as time passes by, but the idea that there was an increase in complexity -- more than the normal -- from ep. 8 onwards is an illusion.)