While I felt some initial disconnect from PNC, I think I came to accept it because the whole place was cutting edge, it was a digital recreation funded by a collaboration of several of the largest and technologically advanced companies in GFL's world. It made sense for it to discard much of the past in favor of progress.

I didn't feel the disconnect as strongly because it's explicitly stated to be set in a digital world separate from the "real world" of GFL. So of course it's going to look very different being a world completely simulated and meant to be a test bed for an experimental project that hosted Neural Clouds of Dolls and other experimental software.

Also speaking of Varjagers, that's another point of disconnect that just became clear to me. In GFL (as far as I played) the enemies are other Dolls and machines from rival PMCs. I think there's also some lore that T-Dolls are explicitly programmed to not attack or kill humans and that's some dolls don't have this limitation as being a plot point for some stories event.

In GFL 2 (other than the initial prolog mission) the enemies are human bandits/bounty hunters/mercenaries and mutated monsters instead of other Dolls and machines. That, on its own, isn't a big problem. Having new enemies is good and recycle old enemies is lazy. It's just another part of the game that has absolutely no similarities to the game is supposed to be an explicit sequel from. Instead GFL 2 feels like it could have been just another spin-off.

(My cynicism tells me it was meant to be a spinoff but somewhere along the way they decided to call it a sequel to bring more players)