(I’m replying to some older posts of this thread without reading what has followed. So forgive me if my opinions state something that was eventually written by other users. 
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I thought about this sentence of yours and I believe that PnC adventure games have become famous for motivating players to do things that they have no reason to do.
For example, I assume that a lot of PnC adventure game players just collect every object that they can take. When they put an object in the inventory, they don’t necessarily know if and when that object will be useful to them, so in that moment they don’t actually have already a reason to do that. But they take the object nonetheless.
This is a behavior that is quite far from reality and it has become common among adventure gamers just because the nature of this genre motivates players to behave in this strange way. My point is: PnC adventure games were never intended to create a realistic environment nor they were intended to increase immersion simulating the real world or expecting the player to behave as he would behave in the real world. Other genres of games were designed to simulate a more realistic world, but definitely not PnC adventure games.
I agree in a general sense, but I think that if the interaction with “useless objects” is optional, it really doesn’t matter if that ratio is high.
In Thimbleweed Park you have a giant library of books that you don’t need to read. Nonetheless, the presence of those useless objects helps creating the right atmosphere. To me it doesn’t matter if this atmosphere makes the game more believable or not, I’m just highlighting the fact that increasing the quantity of optional objects doesn’t necessarily create a situation in which the player looses or is disrespected.
I would also add that the way we (old school adventure gamers) play adventure games today may be profoundly different from how we played them when we were kids: even after we finish the game, our entertainment may continue on the Internet, socializing with other players. As a consequence, the large quantity of “useless” objects in TWP was completely optional from the perspective of the player who is focused only on solving the puzzles to advance the story, but it became instrumental to create and enjoy threads like this one, or this one, which makes me wonder if these useless objects are actually useless.
I like that. You will not find a lot of fans of this technique and people tend to link it to the straw man fallacy, but it’s a common and useful technique used in philosophy and, from a certain perspective, even math.
I’m a huge Star Trek fan but I decided not to play that adventure game and one of the reasons is the kind of interface that you described.
My impression was that the authors didn’t use this kind of interface to its full potential. I have not tried to analyze why I felt this way, but that’s what I felt when I played the game. Probably I perceived that some verbs were too rarely used to justify their presence.
Aaaand… I didn’t know that. 
Does it work in every version of the game?