Other than the obvious silliness of playing as a soldier running around IKEA picking up drain cleaner, my biggest problem with the gameplay is the way that weapon mass, inertia and maneuvering is handled. In reality, the most pleasant weapons to use and navigate through your environment with are short barreled rifles, preferably with folding stocks, like a Galil SAR, AK 105, etc. it’s a huge difference.
But in Tarkov none of those features matter whatsoever. There is no measurable inertia from bringing a weapon and sight up to your eye, you don’t catch your long-ass weapon on the environment, weapon weight doesn’t effect handling at all and very long rifles actually have less sway than short barreled ones.
So what happens is that about a month into a ‘wipe’ every poopsocker is running around with a two meter long musket with a 150 round drum magazine and a 25x scope on it, and they will punish you mercilessly if you use something so silly like, you know, a rifle that you would actually want to use in reality.
There are other issues like there being too great a difference between ammunition types of the same caliber, but the weapon handling is the worst. Especially the way they sell Tarkov as being the great close combat sim.
There's lots that isn't realistic about this game which makes it hard to take it seriously as a sim. The COD-like crazy running/jumping everywhere which even they finally toned down a few patches ago, the ammo, the way 100 meters is considered a long shot, the way armor works with HP and not as actual plates, the medical system and those late game injectors that are ridiculously unbalanced to boost your stats being the biggest one. I think the weapons in particular are pretty good for a video game and certainly the most exhaustive in terms of what you can build/customize with the myriad of weapons parts.
Even the ARMA series lets you pick up any random weapon from the battlefield and use it as if it was perfectly customized for your size and zeroed for you specifically on a range, and that's supposed to be the civilian version of the definitive military training simulator. If it had the weapons modding capability of Tarkov, I'm sure there would've been a lot of the same problems (Exhibit A: Still no universally adopted community ammo damage/penetration standard for mods in ARMA 3).
They try to have exactly what you said with the ergonomics, vertical & horizontal recoil stats for each weapon. For long bolt action rifles in particular that didn't get a lot of dev attention with meta builds with good grips or stocks, you won't be aiming down your optic for more than 20-30 seconds without being forced to go prone or not aim down the sight anymore and wait for the stamina to regenerate. Likewise with long weapons in tight spaces or corridors, you'll have the weapon literally butt up against the environment and not be able to aim with it, so you have to back up to use it, if there's space.
In theory the system should work. The more extras you put on your weapon, the worse the ergonomics gets (the higher capacity mags, the optics, lasers/lights/thermals, etc are all horrible for ergo) which means slower to bring up the sight aim and the less time you can keep looking down the sights.
The trouble is, they seem to try to balance Western vs Eastern weapons as a design goal (since AKs are generally more unstable on auto, this ends up with Western assault rifles being much more unstable than real life) and they are terrible at balancing in general. Despite best efforts, clear metas do emerge each patch and with the patches being months apart, you'll go through periods where certain builds will have it all, with the ultra powerful round to 1 shot kill you that can mount the best optics, silencers and high capacity mags.
Many people seem to play for the early periods after a wipe like now, when nobody has access to those horribly broken high tier combos, high HP armors and the "Pop this needle to win the fight" meds that they'll have 2 months from now, like you said. Many people play singleplayer with that mod just to avoid the lag, cheaters and the meta dudes.
I don't think the devs actually try to sell it as a close combat sim (having more or less dedicated maps for sniping like Woods and actively forcing you to use sniper rifles for quests), and people who are fans are generally fans of the whole thing. I just said it's the best for CQB in my opinion because I think ARMA does everything else better but compared to other offerings on the market, nobody else has put that many CQB immersive features into their game even if they don't always WAD. The environmental sounds of hearing if someone is stepping on broken glass or metal or wood surfaces, shooting through surfaces, the weapon collision with the environment in tight spaces or corners, blind firing around corners or overhead being a standard feature instead of something modded in, the variable stance system so you can stand up partways between crouching and standing all the way up, the way the AI bots have a bit of dynamism to their patrol routes and can converge on an area if they hear fighting, stop, crouch and wait if they haven't seen anyone, etc. Even the pacing of the combat, which is faster than ARMA but slower than the usual FPS works well for CQB.
All of that may exist in other games separately, but I don't know of any other game that has all that together with real world weapons in one game and other devs are clearly eager to copy the formula (Battlefield 2042, Marauders, etc) but again, those dudes probably aren't differentiating between CQB and the rest of the game either. All I know is, I could play Factory forever and have fun, in a way that if you plugged the same structures into an ARMA 3 mission, the mechanics and minor level design details just couldn't be there to give the same experience.
