> personally, i also think that the GameObject system with components is really nice - you can attach numerous different behaviors to any object that you want (composition) vs needing to either work with inheritance in Godot by extending scripts or having child nodes affect the behavior of parent nodes (which feels odd, maybe i'm just used to how Unity works)

Component system is terrible. You only use it to reference Unity built-in components(text, animation, position etc).

> - the support for C# is top notch, IDEs also have nice plugins, e.g. JetBrains Rider tells me which methods are likely to be slow and gives me other hints which is really great

Rider thinks that every method is slow. The hints are useless.

> - all of that said, it feels like the engine has made a steep nose dive in the last 5 years, DOTS (their new ECS) is being implemented gradually and oftentimes still isn't as stable as it could be

As someone who works with Unity every day for the last 11 years now - No! During the last 5 years a lot of new stuff got added. I was seriously not expecting so much to be done given how slow the development was all the way from version 3. I agree that currently it is a bit of a mess with the new UI framework still being in preview and the old one being terrible. I agree that it sucks that there is no networking solution out of the box(there are several good ones out there tho). But I absolutely don't agree that Unity is in a slow decline. I see it getting better with every release and accelerating while doing so.