I’m not sure that decision anxiety is the sole or even primary source of ‘prestige television’.

I’m not sure that decision anxiety is the sole or even primary source of ‘prestige television’. After all, a shift toward a preference for binge-watching (and the type of show that gets better when marathonned rather than getting worse) dates to the first instances of widespread time-shifted home viewing. Buffy replaced Kolchak in the public consciousness because Kolchak was too formulaic to watch in season-long chunks and networks wanted to hype new seasons with marathon reruns of previous seasons — and because Buffy was getting released on DVD. Netflix and other streaming services upped the ante in a UI way, but not via poor UI design: Netflix doesn’t update their catalog every time an episode comes out but instead every time a season comes out (sometimes with a multi-year delay), so binge-watching is the only way to watch that doesn’t involve either using another service that updates faster or forcing yourself to keep to a weekly schedule; however, unlike buying a DVD boxed set, queuing up a series on Netflix doesn’t cost any more than not doing so. Thus, a mainstream audience learned what the anime bootleg fansub community learned ten years earlier: when you can watch a whole season of a show in one sitting with no penalty for dropping it in the middle, doing so is for a large subset of shows — those shows that gain rewatch value by focusing on complex, intricate, and detailed plots and character arcs rather than going for a casual prime-time-TV audience with formulaic structures, running gags, and ripped-from-the-headlines topicality — will be far more enjoyable than watching an episode a week.

You’re absolutely right about Netflix’s UI, though. It’s awful.