I'm watching the second episode of the second season (because I'm bored and have nothing else to watch) and holy shit is this bad.
A truly horrific episode of television. It's the worst episode of the season and takes a nuclear-sized shit over the Brotherhood. Nobody acts the way they do in episode 2 again. Apparently this is largely down to each episode having a different writer so a semi-decent scene or two in one episode is the result of it being a different writer from another.
Bethesda has always said aspects of tactics could be made canon again calm down
After 4 I largely consider Tactics canon, but the difficulty is not with the content and lore introductions themselves necessarily, but because you'd have to pick 1 of 4 wildly different endings.
I think that's a large reason why they're reluctant to confirm it outright. The only precedent for how sequels pick the ending is they go for the "good" one, and Fallout Tactic's "good" ending is
too good. They BoS become arguably more powerful than the NCR at their peak, with a robot army, unlimited food and water and Super Mutants/Ghouls/Deathclaws living side-by-side with humans. FNV further muddies its canonicity by introducing an Enclave presence in Chicago, which either flew under the radar of the Midwest BoS or this Enclave presence is simply going to get ignored if Bethesda head further inland.
I see Tactics as a way for Interplay to end the Fallout by giving the player and fans of the franchise the most saccharine ending possible. Everybody lives in peace, food and resources are abundance, mutans are living peaceably with humans, and so on. Making Tactics outright canon would, conceptually, render any games after it as moot because the trajectory Tactics throws in its ending is one where peace will come to the post-war USA, harmony is achieved by all, with war a thing of the past and everyone happy.
We know in Fallout 5, at bare minimum the Institute is going to get destroyed, but who does it is in the air and who does it ultimately doesn't matter because it's not like anybody
gains from doing it. The BoS, Minutemen, Railroad, don't gain a buff or debuff from personally blowing up the Institute.
Meanwhile Tactics gives a lot of variance in its endings but it also dictates a lot of stuff in the future that is too wildly different from the next. Your options are:
1) Utopia in the Mid-west, with harmonious mutant and human civilisation with food and water aplenty and a robot army and fuck-huge production centre with Vault 0
2) Lawful Evil BoS bringing "peace... through force!" and on track to war with the NCR, with the same exact buffs as the utopian ending
3) BoS becomes a defacto nation, integrating with tribals and slowly building up their power uncontested
4) BoS are exterminating mutants and wrangling up the excess to work in labour camps. Humans dissidents and mutants form the Mutant Liberation army to rebel about this BoS, waging guerrilla warfare as they're pushed West, implying conflict will soon occur between the Western BoS and the Mid-Western BoS.
3) is the safest but if the area is ever touched again, the game still won't matter because it's also the ending where the BoS is most vulnerable and can easily be killed off. The only other niggle is whether or not you want these goobers to be a thing.
