Cutscenes serve several purposes. Some of which are:
- Exposition: Providing important story information and sometimes mechanics the player needs to know.
- Reward: Solving a puzzle or making a discovery yields interesting text, hopefully information that fills in lore or gaps the player has been curious about.
- Shortcut: Taking the narrative through a time-jump or a non-interactive section of plot to get back to the interactive “good stuff” - like the player going to sleep and having a dream, or quickly narrating what happens when the player returns home after their job and continuing the next day when the gameplay is set at the workplace.
If your cutscene is warranted by the story and needs to be there, you shouldn’t need to worry about it. As long as your text is interesting in some way - informational, well written, funny - it is never unwelcome, especially if the player has been working toward it and is invested in the story.
In general, avoid lengthy game-opening exposition/lore-dumps if possible. I always get twitchy if I am playing interactive fiction that doesn’t seem to want to let me interact. The player shouldn’t feel like they’re needing to do research to understand your story. And if you can trim and polish any longer text down to an efficient sheen and get the player back to interacting as quickly as possible, that’s just good writing. You can always trim more.
You said you don’t like “press space to continue” but you want to strike a happy medium between a wall of text and bullet-points. Sometimes this can be fudged by putting tiny interactions or choices in the cutscene. Consider that a cutscene can be an interactive scene and needn’t be only text.
You could temporarily trap the player in a cutscene location and have them walk down a long corridor while they ruminate on their situation doling out text each time they move. If the player just battled a dragon, maybe it knocked all their inventory out of their hands and they need to pick everything up, which gives you natural pauses for the player to relate bits of inner-monologue upon retrieving each item. If the player is remembering a conversation, you could do an interactive flashback and let the conversation play out with scenery and room detail the player can decide to interact with. If the cutscene is the mad scientist discovering his secret formula, you can temporarily throw the player into the scientist’s role and let them play that character, discovering the exposition via interaction.
Sometimes, you just gotta do a cutscene. Just make sure it’s engaging and interesting in some way.