The actor who played Lalo was really good but the character gets less interesting and more like a plot device the more you think about him. The final confrontation between Gus and Lalo is probably not going to go down as one of the best scenes in the show. The cartel plot was just leading up to the end of Nacho, who was a decent character, but it didn’t take a genius to guess he was going to die. At least we got a good “chase” episode involving him before he went. The episode with Mike and Saul out in the desert was pretty good too, but BrBa already did “Four Days Out.”
If Saul and Mike were a bit less compelling by the end of the show, I think it’s generally agreed that Kim Wexler was one of Gilligan/Gould’s best ever characters by the end of the show, that her arc made up for the dispelling of Saul and Mike.

I think I ended up watching the first season at least three times to catch up, and had to rewatch the fifth season to prepare for the sixth.

Regarding the connection to BrBa, I wanted to say that it perversely got worse as the show went on (even though I thought the show’s last season, where it was most like BrBa, was the best), with the best BrBa cameo being Tuco, which was in the second fuckin’ episode of the show, and the worst being, of course, Walt and Jesse (which was not only easy to predict, but also a major blown opportunity to make up for the failure of El Camino.) However, that falls apart because I thought bringing back Marie for the series finale was a really great idea (it was actually better than any scene Betsy Brandt did on BrBa.) I also sometimes forget there was a Hank/Gomez cameo. Other cameos, like Lydia, were just perfunctory and forgettable.

Then Bob Odenkirk immediately did a new show, Lucky Hank, or whatever it was called, that barely anybody watched at all.