Ghost in the Shell Watch Order
Three separate continuities that share characters and share nothing else. Knowing that is most of the answer; the rest is deciding which one you want.
Ghost in the Shell looks disordered because people try to assemble it into a single timeline. It does not have one. It has three continuities that share a cast and a premise and are otherwise unrelated, and once you know that the ordering problem mostly disappears.
The short answer
Start with the 1995 film. Then pick a continuity rather than a next episode.
The three continuities
The films. Ghost in the Shell (1995), then Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004). Two features, one following the other, and the reason the franchise has the reputation it has.
Stand Alone Complex. Beginning in 2002, a full television continuity with no connection to the 1995 film despite using the same characters. It runs through a second season, a feature-length follow-up, and eventually SAC_2045. This is the largest body of work in the franchise and the one to choose if you want to live in the setting rather than visit it.
Arise. A prequel continuity covering Motoko Kusanagi before Section 9 exists, and how the team is assembled. Its 2015 feature then closes the loop by ending roughly where the 1995 film begins, which makes it the one continuity that deliberately connects to another.
Why start with the 1995 film
Because it is eighty-odd minutes, it assumes nothing, and it is the version of this story that everything else is in conversation with. If it does not work for you, the franchise probably will not, and you will have spent an evening rather than a season finding out.
It is also the least representative entry, which is worth saying plainly. It is slow, cold and much more interested in a question than in a plot. Stand Alone Complex is a procedural with recurring cases and a much warmer ensemble. People who bounce off the film often like the series a great deal, so treat one as a poor predictor of the other.
What not to do
Do not try to reconcile them. There is no ordering of these works that produces a consistent history, because they were not made to have one, and the contradictions people find when they attempt it are the expected result rather than a puzzle.
Other franchises where the starting point is a genuine obstacle: Fate, where the chronological entry is the one to save for last, and Monogatari, where the timeline order takes the design apart.