Indeed, the original "serial format" of "Pinocchio" explains a lot as to why we get constant plot twists and near-death experiences... As for the conflict of values despite the "preachy" tone, I always return to this article by Jean-Marie Apostolidès, "Pinocchio or the male education" (it is in French, but I think I made a very loose translation of it some years ago). It offers an "educational reading" of the story of Pinocchio, in the context of a pedagogical, educational story written for children in a recently-unified Italy with a still-fractured society due to the political and geographical changes of the previous decades ; and it tries to explain the entire conflict of the book through the challenge that Italy faced at the time - trying to create a unified system of education, for all children, of all social classes...
"Pinocchio", trying to place itself within this ambitious project, gets stuck in two contradicting, if not incompatible, systems of value that Collodi (according to Apostolidès) illustrates/doubles with the gendered-parental-conflict. I'll make it clearer:
Apostolidès proposes to see Gepetto, the "father who wants to have a son without a female intervention", and his entire world (aka the one in which Pinocchio exists for the beginning of the book) as the "lower-class" world. Gepetto is a working man with his tools but lacking money and constantly worried about the next meal - which kicks off the "quest for fortune" and "food obsession" present throughout the novel. It is a world where to be able to sustain your family you need to go to school, but school requires money, so the parents sacrifice themselves to obtain this money - the child going to school has to learn and work well there to be able to "pay back" their parent the money they spend, and then be able to sustain them and work hard like them. As such, with Gepetto, the main value and rule Pinocchio is told is the one of "pay back", and it is centered around the quest for money/food doubled by the necessity to give back what was given, and the idea that to become a "proper man/proper adult", you need to be hard-working and to sustain yourself. Which is also the reason Pinocchio, the eternal rebel, the insolent towards everything, immediately flee, runs away and enter in conflict with the figure of Gepetto, who wants a puppet to fully control and manipulate to bring him money, who wants an "animal to train" (foreshadowing the bestial transformation later), but this rigid, traditionalist, miserable world is one Pinocchio flees... And it is in part because of Gepetto's own failures (after all, didn't he forget to make Pinocchio ears, metaphorically making the boy deaf to peoples' advices and only willing to listen to his inside voice?).
This flight and journey then leads Pinocchio to the realm of the Blue Fairy, who becomes "the mother raising her son without any man", the female an maternal universe, much more fantastical and fantasmagorical than the more "realistic" father universe. And Apostolidès notes that with the Blue Fairy we have an abrupt and complete reversal of value as now Pinocchio is undergoing a "bourgeois education" and faced with the bourgeois idea of growing up. He lives in a comfortable, pleasant palace ; is role as a "child" is not anymore to be working for the parent, but to be cared for by the parent, and now the rules given are to obey, to be a "good boy", and you have this "luxury of allowing yourself to be a child for a little longer" that poor kids, forced to become adults as soon as possible, do not have. But the Fairy is also an "imperfect" parent figure due to her ambiguity - frightening the child, playing emotional tricks with him, constantly shifting her appearance - the same way the "maternal world", more magical, bearing from the literary fairytales of old, is one filled with wonders and monsters, mysteries "as benevolent as hostile", culminating with Pinocchio "finding his father in the belly of the shark", which Apostolidès points out might have a subtext of the "devouring motherhood".
Apostolidès concludes that the ending of the story is basically Pinocchio reaching a balance after being exposed to the two poles: he returns to his father, accepts his "paternal world", is an obedient child who works for his father, to sustain him and become his "equal and heir" - but while he leaves behind the "fairy-world", this "journey through the "maternal world" helped Pinocchio face his fears and desire, gain an individuality, learn to differentiate reality from illusion, and so it made him "rich" both in a personal way and a literal way, as the Blue Fairy gives the father-son duo the treasure that helps them have a "happily ever after". Apostolidès points out that, had Pinocchio given him to Gepetto's social model and traditionalist habits, it would have just sustained the vicious cycle of the misery of the low-class ; but because he obtained the bourgeois-mother-fairy treasure, they can actually "climb up" into a proper, decent middle-class.
(And Apostolidès has the rightfully ironic observation that Walt Disney's Pinocchio, moved to the values of 1940 USA, has the reversal social subtext. Pinocchio there is the child of two "parents" that work together since the start to make a "complete" boy, Gepetto is not a starving, poor wood-cutter but a toy-maker living with a certain ease, embodying the "traditional Protestant work ethic" of the USA, and Pinocchio is as a result an "ordinary middle-class American child". Here the conflict is about the villains tempting him "beyond his condition", to grow up "too early" and be an "adult before his time" either by becoming a child-star in the puppet show or by enjoying adult activities in Pleasure Island... And in the good versus evil neat divide brought by Disney, opposed to the more complex moralities of Collodi, the "evil side" is... poor. The Cat and the Fox are marginals living on the edge of the "abundant society", the naughty children turned into donkeys are all clearly from a low, poor class, and Pleasure Island is based onto the Luna Parks, which were perceived with distrust for being too "popular", aka open to everybody, entertainments where "shady" people could be met - and that Walt Disney himself would oppose with his cleaner, more "proper", fully middle-class, Disneyland... That Apostolidès mocks as another incarnation of the same "Pleasure Island").
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