Textual Criticism: Isn't the Transmission of the Biblical Text Like a Game of "Telephone"?

Another excerpt from Justin Taylor's interview with Dan Wallace on textual criticism. This is an objection you might here and should be ready to see through.

Isn’t the process of copying a copy of a copy somewhat akin to the old “telephone game”?
Hardly. In the telephone game the goal is to garble an original utterance so that by the end of the line it doesn’t resemble the original at all. There’s only one line of transmission, it is oral rather than written, and the oral critic (the person who is trying to figure out what the original utterance was) only has the last person in line to interrogate.

When it comes to the text of the NT, there are multiple lines of transmission, and the original documents were almost surely copied several times (which would best explain why they wore out by the end of the second century).

Further, the textual critic doesn’t rely on just the last person in the transmissional line, but can interrogate many scribes over the centuries, way back to the second century.
And even when the early manuscript testimony is sparse, we have the early church fathers’ testimony as to what the original text said.

Finally, the process is not intended to be a parlor game but is intended to duplicate the original text faithfully—and this process doesn’t rely on people hearing a whole utterance whispered only once, but seeing the text and copying it.

The telephone game is a far cry from the process of copying manuscripts of the NT.