You are saying it like it's something bad. It's not. There is nothing bad or boring in passive reading or watching - as long as you are interested in story. Moreover - if you are interested in story - anything else distracting from it will just irritate you. Any gameplay or even choices/bad ends are exactly this - irritating factors distracting you from reading a story, used as fillers to prolong gameplay length. It's like waiting for stamina refill in mobile games - it gives you nothing except spending your time. And if you are not interested in story - nothing else helps unless story is just not meant to play any important role in a game. And if that's the case - it's bad visual novel by definition.It's simple really - because it doesn't feel like a game if you are just cruising through a completely linear collection of excerpts of text accompanied by static (and seldom moving) images! A KN is basically the in-between version of a novel and a movie, with the main difference being that most KNs don't excell at writing as much as a good novel does, or at visuals as much as a movie does. There is not even any element of "playing" involved, as playing assumes you take at least a few actions and interact with whatever media you're consuming - for KNs, you read and perhaps watch them, but you don't "play" them.
I would recommend to read more non-erotic visual novels - to expand your view of what they can and can't do. For example linear works such as Higurashi or Umineko - can do perfectly well what you said without any choices. To give you more concrete example - the story there divided in a chapters which meant to be read in strict order - yet each of them plays the same story again and again with different endings - like characters were put in time loop of sorts - with what-if scenario of different actions and consequences each time. And each chapter brings you closer gradually to solving the main mystery of the novel.Non-linear stories are often actually more complete than linear ones, because they explore the depth of more characters in a story and also take several possibilities in the plot to their own conclusion, which is something a linear story can never do...
There is another approach to linearity like in 428 (that's the name of the novel). There are huge anount of choices, routes and endings - yet they are all interconnected closely - you can't get access past bad end in one route unless you get key item in other route - for example. To reach true end and see the whole story conclusion - reader forced to read the whole amount of text the game contains. In other words all choices and "freedom" there is just ORDER in what reader decides to stick together various bits of text to get the whole story. Yes, he could see various what-if partial endings on the way to true end - but it's not making the story any less linear. In that sense any usual novel with choices and endings - if you are interested enough to read them all - are as just linear as a novel without choices. In any case you will read only what author could write - and nothing more. With only difference that you could decide an ORDER of which bits of written text you will read first and which second - in so called "interactive" novels. And that the story will be much shorter than in linear novel because other choices will force you to return to early part of the story again and again -while linear novel could continue the story further and further in that exact time. Will that (ability to choose ORDER of what you read) make such compelling difference in the end to make novel more interesting? I don't think so.