But you don't "need" an extra video. Everything an extra video can tell you IS in the game, and not that deeply hidden. The thing is the story isn't just one linear simple action story, we're presented 4 different timelines displayed alternatively, and there is meaning in the order you go through them, as well as a LOT of symbolism throughout the game. If you don't pay attention, or if you rush too much through it (playing it in one sitting like some people apparently did), or if you just don't care for whatever reason (like being angry at the writers because of what happens in the game, or because you're busy over-analyzing everything before you have fully experienced it), then yea, you're going to miss a lot of stuff and you're not going to understand certain things the characters do.
Plus the way they decided to tell the story actively makes you have to retroactively think about what happened before in the game, because new information changes how you view what you already experienced. For instance, the very last cutscene in its entirety with Joel and Ellie on the porch gives a complete new nuance to the entirety of Ellie's arc and all of her decisions.
You say the writer/storyteller failed at his job. I say the gamer/viewer failed at theirs. It's like going through a long poem and saying "This doesn't make any sense, you shouldn't need to analyze it to understand the meaning. It would have been better if it was prose". You might prefer one style or the other, but you should judge the work for what it does in the style it does, not just say it fails because it doesn't follow your preference.
And this is not to say that people only don't like the game because they don't get it. It's just to say that IF you don't make the least effort to understand the characters and story, saying the story is bad is pretty meaningless. For instance, in Joe's review he states that Ellie's story doesn't make sense because it ends with "failed revenge", that Abby never shows remorse in any way, and that the game is about "revenge bad". All of this is blatantly incorrect, and it genuinely seems that he was unable to look at the game's story at anything deeper than the most superficial level, and that he gave no thought as to all of those things after having the entirety of the context by the end of the game.