There are very few situations where you have to choose one scene or the other. For example when Mao leaves the house on the first night you can go left or right to look for her. Both scenes result in meeting a character you'll meet later anyways. The vast majority of choices in this game are just whether you want to see a particular scene or not. I think the only real exception is when you're lost on the first day of school it's better to wander around looking for the office yourself so you can unlock a specific story path.
The project manager got covid earlier in the year but is healthy now and working on the game once again. There was some stuff that only they could do so progress on the merge stalled. In their spare time other dev members worked on post merge content so updates should be very regular for a while once the merge finally comes out.
