I picked street kid and I still was confused by why the first part of the story was even necessary. The game could have taken a lesson from Kurt Vonnegut, who said to start a story as close to the end as possible.
Concerning the life paths, it's just a fancy rumor that something was cut there. True, the origin stories for life paths in CP2077 could be perhaps as long as in Dragon Age: Origins, but keeping them short and tight is also fine.
Why have them at all? Broadly speaking, they may nudge the player into a specific ending. A lot of players vocal on forums would dismiss anything but completing all endings just for the sake of it, but if we are discussing this seriously as a role-playing game, what goes into the decision which ending to pursue matters.
The lifepath system was a key feature in the TTRPG, obvious handled a lot differently in the TTRPG than video game where they have merged the Roles with the Lifepath.
I think people are disappointed as they were expecting DA:O levels of paths but got 15-20 mins and a few chat options (that don't add up to anything).
> Your choice of lifepath will influence parts of your journey throughout Cyberpunk 2077, and each one will have an entirely different introduction to the same overarching story.
Tho it's a bit telling how one of the introduction quests is used as an example for how the lifepath choice makes a difference past the introduction.
In my 30 hours of playing I've had only one situation where my choice of Nomad seemed to make a difference; During a Gig at Kabuki market I could ask another Nomad there about the location of a person I was looking for.
Dunno how that quest would have played out otherwise without that.
A Corpo can get the drone easier by talking to the other corpo and seeing through their bullshit. There are also a few dialogue options based on higher stats, but I'm not sure how much they affect actual gameplay.
I hadn't heard this maxim before, and I haven't played Cyberpunk, but this actually strikes me as something a lot of games do to a fault.
The original Mirror's Edge (a personal favorite) is a good example. That game's story has many obvious issues, from stilted characters to cutscenes that look like cheap flash animations, but I think it all could have worked a lot better if you spent the first few chapters as a normal Runner doing standard deliveries, before things started going to hell.
This would ground you in the world and provide a sense of what it's like to be a Runner, so you'd care about preserving their way of life later on. Games as a medium are uniquely good at this sort of thing, from the early days of Final Fantasy.