With comics, no matter what, everything expects you to have read issues 23-45 and 60-78, crossovers: Amazing War and Dark Legion, spin-off issues as well as entire different titles that reference some important event. There is no way to have the full context unless you read hard enough to make it a job as opposed to a hobby.
I just read the whole of Immortal Hulk in the past few days. It's really good, I recommend it thoroughly, though I'll say the first half is a lot stronger than the second half. Warning: It's quite pozzed. A lot of lefty talking points, climate change, white privilege, etc. One prominent character is a tranny, and
her transness makes
her resistant to a mind-manipulation scheme, which is crucial to help the good guys save the day. Still, good book, read it if you can.
BUT I DIGRESS!
I read the omnibus, which contains some tie ins to events. One of them is for Absolute Carnage, in which, completely unexplained in the omnibus, Bruce Banner and the many Hulk personalities are somehow talking in a dark room with someone we don't see until the end. It turns out it's Venom, and they're in Banner's head, and they "welcome" Venom to be one of the members of Banner's system. So how did we get here? What repercussions will it have? Will Venom factor into the story from now on, since he's inside Banner's head too?
So I speed read Absolute Carnage (which is Absolute Shit, by the way), and what happens is at some point Banner is helping with some machine, the bad guy shows up, and Venom jumps to him since Hulk is a stronger host and will fare better against the bad guy. The tie-in happens pretty much between panels, as Banner's mind debates if it should accept Venom's possession or not.
Then it has zero effect, as Venom is ripped out of Banner immediately.
What the fuck was the point of even tying into this event? There was absolutely no reason to have Banner there at all, could have been any smart guy working on the machine. Of course, the point is getting someone who's buying a good book to buy a bad book, for the complete story. The series has several mentions of Hulk going out and having offscreen adventures, which actually happen in like the Fantastic Four book and shit like that. I checked those things too, and they also are completely irrelevant. More tricks to get people to waste money, see if they get hooked to the F4 book (they won't, because it was Slott, so it was bad).
I ramble, but yes, this illustrates your point. A good book takes stupid detours or lays little traps to make you go into tangents in other books, that make zero difference to the actual story, and if they do, they just make it worse. Terrible thing to do to your costumers.