I don't do drugs :P

Lol no, the problem is that "Monkey Wrench" makes sense only if you know the American term.
In other languages you're probably screwed (except with trial&error or hints).

And in any case that puzzle is still absurd.

Well, you have a point, but if you're a frequent player of the genre, you typically know just by instinct or whatever what general category to put a game into or at least tag it with.
Take something like the Ace Attorney series, for example. Despite looking like visual novels, they play much more like adventure games.

You'll probably need a skunk at some point...

Well, isn't it supposed to be a spiritual successor to Planescape: Torment? And frankly, Plancescape Torment in some ways felt more like an adventure than most rpgs (e.g. combat, leveling up skills etc. which is usually an important part of rpgs was clearly secondary at best).

Originally adventure games were not point&click, but type&type.

I guess there are just a historical reasons why "games where you solve puzzles in some kind of world" is called adventure games. Probabably the first widely known such game was ADVENT (stands for "adventure" with a 8-character limit), as you are adventuring there trying to find a pirate treasure.

So I guess such games where you wander around in a game world solving puzzles were thought as "games like ADVENTure" or simply "games where you are adventuring in a game world, instead of shooting aliens in space or jumping over rolling barrels on platforms". Hence it made sense to start calling such non-space shooter etc. games as "adventure games". It was the first game genre where you do "adventuring" so it reserved that broadly vague and generic term.

Then later people got to know different types of "adventuring games" like the Wizardry and Ultima series, games that are also about "adventuring in a game world" but with stats and fighting enemies too, and less about puzzles to solve. They were to be called "roleplaying games" because of the characters you created for and played in the games, and I guess the slight resemblence to pen%paper RPGs (the stats). Similarly, "roleplaying game" is kind of a vague term too because you play some kind of role in so many games, even in adventure games... but yeah, certain types of games got to reserve that term too.

And so on and so forth... nowadays most games don't neatly fall into certain category, even roughly, but uses traits from many "old genres", hence e.g. action-adventure, action-RPG, tactical RPG, whatever-whatever etc.

But at least we are not talking about "Doom-clones" anymore when we mean FPS games... Many modern gamers don't even know what Doom is.

I've heard about the beta that there is barely any combat in the game, and a lot of running around and talking (which doesn't have to mean it's bad), so yeah, maybe there is a large "adventure" part in there, at least in a way. Of course, "RPG" does not just mean combat, but for CRPGs it is usually a pretty essential part. Maybe that's where this is coming from. On the other hand, Dear Esther is also tagged as "Adventure" and even "Open World", so yeah, maybe the tags are not really that accurate. At least, "Adventure" does not necessarily have to mean "Point & Click"

It's not so much that "the rest of the world" loves it, but those who do (like me) REALLY love it. Most people have never played it, and if they have, not much. For more than ten years I knew no one personally who had played through it besides myself, and only a few who ever played it at all, even though a lot of my friends are also RPG fans. And today, I can't really blame anyone for not playing it - most people are just not used to reading so much text in a game any more, and PS:T was extreme in that regard even when it was released. But it's a shame that they miss out on what I consider the best story ever.

netflix's categorization overlappings are THE WORST EVER

GOG is logical and sensible

netflix? you get stuff like "trainspotting" in the comedy section

Well, the fact it's absurd actually paradoxically makes sense in a game like that. I find that usually in games like it's a matter of sort of immersing yourself in the game world, and getting the odd logic by which it works.

The real problem are games that are supposed to be set in the real world, and follow proper logic, but still throw such curveballs at you from time to time.

Well, I guess everything can be subjective. I'd file The Exorcist under comedy :D

Hm, that's funny. When I tried to replay Torment, it was actually the other way around for me. I loved replaying the mortuary part, it's only when I got out of it, that my motivation to continue decreased.

(And I think part of the reason for that might be that the mortuary has these strong adventure game elements while some parts after that are a bit more focussed on the bad combat than on mystery, puzzle-solving and story-telling.)
I can see why someone would tag "Dear Esther" as adventure, but "open world"?! The world of the average linear point-and-click adventure is more "open" than "Dear Esther" ... XD