The cartel stuff is mostly redundant. Anyone who saw BrBa knows all they need to about Gus and Hector,

Which is made worse by the fact that much of those plotlines only made sense in reference to Breaking Bad. It felt like the show never answered the question “Why do all of these plotlines exist in the same TV series” with anything other than “Because they’re all prequels to Breaking Bad.” They picked one character to name the series after and give more time to than anyone else, and then told all of the prequel stories that they wanted to tell. It felt like the series was either too much or too little.