I have no idea who made this but I found it on reddit and decided to share. Here's the full-size image for those who want to zoom in.
We can argue which GitS work is the best but I enjoy all of it. Even bad GitS is better than most anime. And I'd argue the live action movie would've been better received if it didn't have the high expectations of being a GitS adaptation. It's still a fun sci-fi movie.
To be fair, this includes all novels and video games too. As far as animation, I see it as: the two movies, Stand Alone Complex anime, Arise anime, and SAC_2045 anime. It isn't too overwhelming in my opinion. Although, Stand Alone Complex is like 52 episodes, which is longer than most anime I watch.
Also, Stand Alone Complex and SAC_2045 both had their episodes pared down into compilation movies (which is what the arrows represent). So you could get through those even faster if you wanted.
The live action movie was terrible. The shoehorned love story was completely unnecessary and ruins the character development. It's also a textbook example of whitewashing.
But the most egregious thing is that it completely misses the point of the original by making Motoko explicitly human. In the original, it is an open question whether Motoko is a human or an AI that believes itself to be human, which the antagonist AI continually questions her about. It must be this way for the plot to have any meaning. Without this central conflict around self-identity and self-knowledge the story is empty, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
It's more GitS, which is always a good thing. With the new character models you can tell this is a new continuity and to not worry about trying to align into earlier stories/plotlines, even though everything is still similar. This is kind of telling the story of how Major joined Section 9, but things are different enough that you wouldn't call it a prequel series.
Arise is probably the easiest to get through because it's only four 50-minute OVAs. Then they re-cut those 4 OVAs into eight 30-min episodes and called the series 'Arise – Alternative Architecture'. Of course, just to complicate things, Alternative Architecture got another "OVA" as the final two 30-min episodes called Pyrophoric Cult. So you could consider the entire series to be 5 OVAs. Oh, and I guess Ghost in the Shell: The New Movie is also part of this continuity. So 5 OVAs and a movie.
You can watch the entire series on Crunchyroll. Note that Crunchyroll shows "season 1" as being all the OVAs, "season 2" is the re-cut OVAs into episodes (Alternative Architecture), and "season 4" is The New Movie. I have no idea why Crunchyroll didn't call that "season 3"...