I love the multiverse aspect in Spider-Man but I don’t need the entire MCU timeline hopping. Maybe that’s what the comics were for a time but for me as a movie fan this is an unfortunate development.
Once you open the time travel thing you can't put the genie back in the bottle and that's where a lot of movies/shows suck. Hey here's this super cool show about a plane crash and an island and these interesting characters and these mysterious "others" snaking around and whats that noise wait is that a fricken polar bear and magic numbers they have to type into a computer or everyone dies and what there are houses on the island and oh its time travel ah #### I quit.
Strange and endgame and, to a lesser extent, infinity war, messed with time travel/timelines. Endgame even explicitly talked about the multiple timelines when the ancient one refused the stones to banner at first, and the whole reason captain America went back was to avoid creating a separate branch, which they explicitly talked about in loki. So at least it's all consistent so far. But it sucks because a dead character used to mean dead dead and now it just means dead for now. How do you have high stakes conflict when one version dies and there are infinite others?
The final episode seemed like it was all tell, but it wasn't really. They showed different lokis and added an interesting new character. Different Thors are now possible. They showed how all the timelines work and how different they can be but also how they branch. They gave a sense of scope to the whole thing - there's infinite timelines but there's also an after the timelines that isn't quite written yet.
But more importantly they established consequences. Killing the weird dude just brought a new worse dude. There are good dudes and bad dudes and they are all hyper aware of the timelines and have powers that let them bounce between them and do bad things to the people in them, and they have different ethics that don't seem to mind killing off an entire branch of the multiverse to protect their own. Loki is aware of the different branches, but most people aren't, even mobius.
They also established a new bad dude and the bad dude sounds really bad but we've only gotten a glimpse. That was the formula that made the first phases of the marvel universe work.. you introduce characters, you introduce powerful villains who seem like they can defeat them and you show how strong your characters are by how they overcome the bad guys. But where do you go from thanos, who seemed like the biggest baddest guy ever? That's why they had to set up their next biggest baddest opponent and make it someone who can throw nasty things at them the next few movies, and where they can win some and lose some but ultimately face an impossible opponent and then somehow beat them.
So I'm cautiously optimistic that they can do a good job with this next phase but they are walking a dangerous line where they can easily lose their core audience. The ending, to me, gave me hope that they're doing it right.