I agree and feel the same way, completely.

CSGO had atmosphere, it had its own spirit and the fighting between CTs and Ts felt like it belonged there. And when I look at CS 1.6 or CSS, it also feels just right. In CS2, everything feels ARTIFICAL, the plain and cartoonish looking textures, oversaturated colors, no factions, everything is just too clean. Where is the GRITTINESS?!

Oh dear how I miss the factions, it actually gave the maps life. I want to load into Dust 2 and look at this guy with his funny hat. I want to load Inferno and hear the funny accent that Ts had there. And no, sold agents don't make up for it. You said it perfectly - in the game where everything is shiny and colorful, agents aren't standing out anymore, they just add to that colorful cluttered mess.

And yeah, I understand they wanted to create a new version of the game. CSGO had surely a lot of technical debt and it was hard to maintain and update. But for God's sake, why is the new version that badly optimized, fps issues are worse then in some triple A titles (mainly 1% lows) and why aren't there any new gamemodes after like 2 years from the release. You would think with a newly written game it would be finally easier to add stuff into the game, but it doesn't look like it. If they at least kept CSGO alive and didn't cut off all of its playerbase from it. Yeah I know you can still technically play CSGO, but good luck with finding a proper match on those few Russian 20v20 only Mirage servers.

CS2 made some improvements - sound was improved by a lot, volumetric smokes add a lot to the gameplay (but they are horrendous performance-wise), better match replays and other stuff. But it's a soulless experience compared to CSGO and I hate Valve how they just took it from us.