I am sad to say I was very excited for this as a programmer person when it first got announced. It was going to be a publicly accessible Source 2 SDK! It was the sequel to gmod! It would have a bunch of tooling that did away with all the inconvenient parts of gmod! It would be a new game engine to compete with Unity and Unreal! It was gonna be awesome! And then it finally comes out and it looks like a fucking web3 metaverse game with all the paid cosmetics and it turns out they removed all of the bits of Source 2 people actually wanted to play with.
I had friends who were in the developer preview who all eventually gave up on it because Facepunch doesn't know how to make an API. So many breaking changes happened during EA and even when garry promised he'd "bend over backwards to not break shipped games" they were still getting broken. Literally every architecture change they have made is for the worse. The steam reviews say that the server model is forced client-authoritative which is fucking laughable. Good luck making any remotely serious multiplayer game unless you roll your own (and at that point, why not go use Unity or Unreal?)
This is a toy engine. They have taken a mature, beautiful game engine and make it completely useless except for shitty toy games like clickers and little 2d arcade games -- stuff you can already make for free in other engines without having to pay licensing fees or compete for space with vibecoded garbage. It can't even compete with its own predecessor, gmod, since at least gmod is easy to use.
It's like if Source 2 was made by Indians.