According to Netflix, The Witcher was watched by 76 million households around the world. It's now being considered as Netflix's biggest series debut to date, even though the series had definitely several issues, with the biggest of them all being the confusing timeline.
The show used multiple timelines to tell the individual stories of Geralt, and the rest of the main characters. According to the showrunner, Lauren Schmidt,
season two will move away from that approach, but not because of complaints. Schmidt also said, that while she didn't expect it to be as controversial as it was, she still stand behind it, in terms of storytelling. She added that the goal was to get to know each character individually, and the only way to do that was through separate timelines.