Johnny feels forced because his storyline fukks up the pace of the entire game. V is supposed to have a short period of time to solve his issue before losing control of his body.
It makes you feel like you should be doing that before anything else in the game, but if you just do the main story you miss alot of good side quest and context for all the characters. If you do the side quest first then it feels like you're bullshytting around like V doesn't have weeks to live.
Imo the shyt with Johnny shouldn't have been the focal point of the whole game. He should have just been a conscious living in V's head commenting on his actions during the game, get rid of that shyt about V losing control of his body.
I’m usually okay with these kind of concessions in open world games. We know that the world eating Dragon ain’t gonna kill everyone in Skyrim, you know?
My biggest issue was that it was a simple way to handle this that they already laid the groundwork for.
Make an animation of V popping up a couple of those pills that Misty gives him that “slows down Johnny’s progression”.
After a certain amount of missions, you could even have a timed mission (Tie the animation into your level ups and street cred ups) that has you go back to your apartment so you can “restock” and you can have in-depth conversations with Johnny and choose to take the red pills to listen to him more.
I actually think the existential crisis of Johnny taking over V’s mind is peak cyberpunk tragedy. Doubly so if you played Cyberpunk 2020 or Shadowrun.