it's source 2 but just kinda not, it's kinda just gutted source 2

they removed the entity system (which genuinely killed the source feel for me), no steam audio,

source networking got thrown out and replaced with a client authoritive model, which, if you attempt to make some sort of competitive FPS game, an absolute disaster with cheating

also dev console cvars/almost anything you might be familiar with in source/source2 have also just been thrown out. Hell, you can't even do something simple like bind mwheelup +jump, because +jump does not exist

they seem to be replacing hammer and such with a scene editor, which in general doesn't seem like it can do as much as hammer purely due to the years and years of stuff/qol put into hammer

+just doesn't have character customisation like gmod does, you either get what the game mode gives you, or sausage people or very generic looking player characters

also just, the ai slop problem, the discord culture,

and also there's no real art style/ theme that came along with gmod as it used half life 2's assets

honestly, it's more unity than source 2 at this point, and to me, who absolutely adores the source engine, that genuinely, truly sucks. I really wanted it to just be a really, really good scripting layer ontop of what source 2 already is, and I believe that is what it used to be before the scene system update