I was kind of trying to be generous with that part because I don’t care to argue to the contrary, but I agree with you. I just thought other aspects were more salient and it’s not like Dread is such an awful game that giving it good status warps the discussion, it’s just that it is a struggle to make it interesting, as you note.

The part that I would emphasize, which you know of course but deserves to be said, is that you can just openly access many branching paths and different tools can often be used to address the same obstacle rather than putting everything behind “blue key for the blue door, red key for the red door” gating like worse metroidvanias use as a structural crutch. There are still hard blocks (mostly requiring crystal dash or shade cloak) that are either overly difficult (crystal) or impossible (shade) to overcome without specific tools, but generally the game is very open and allows for at least two or three solutions accessible even to a very casual player. It’s a dying art to actually have routing like that in a casual game’s playthrough, despite the fact that people never stop talking about it in reference to Dark Souls (especially with the master key).