It's a severe case of obsession over technical effects, high resolution textures and polygon count while lacking absolutely any sort of coherent art direction. You can turn off the irritating visual effects like lens flares anytime, but there's no check mark to give the mod's author maturity or slider for how much of the original game's dystopian atmosphere you want to see preserved.
Some people defend this mod claiming it makes the game up to the modern AAA graphics standards. I'm sorry, but modern AAA games are about proper art direction and consistency more than about how many graphical effect options there are available. And I don't think immature approach to characters and environments, putting dildos at Alyx's place and leaving big-dicked clown graffiti everywhere is a current AAA industry standard either.
This mod is an abomination under the guise of update, a vapid pretender to the original game, with none of it's overused thick foliage, extra props and flashy shaders able to disguise it's tastelessness.
I'm not even sure how these issues should be approached. Immature graffiti decals and dildos are easy to remove, but the game environment seriously needs to be reworked, probably even reworking multiple locales from scratch, which is an awful lot of work.
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