ok so i have done a good bit of testing now (still more to do because it's late) and here are my conclusions:
1) csgo 128 tick networking "works better" because it's 128 tick
2) cs2 at 64 tick (without damage prediction) has almost no room for improvement with how fast it relays information back to the player
3) cs2 at 128 tick would most likely improve the game feel significantly at this point
4) people are misremembering how bad 64 tick matchmaking was compared to 128 tick
5) people who are "good" at the game only remember paying attention while playing faceit/esea/officials. no one who is pixel peeping like this was EVER doing it to matchmaking clips, and if they were usually the clip was down to very high pings/super near misses
6) lag compensation and interpolation can be annoying, but people misunderstand what the alternative is (lag extrapolation, MUCH MUCH worse)
7) source 2 was very, very fucked at launch, and has come a very long way. 64 tick on top of the game having strange netcode behavior were compounding issues on top of one another. it makes sense why valve locked it to 64 tick while the game was in it's infancy.
fixes to all of these problems:
1) valve needs to unlock the game and allow for 128 tick cs2 to be able to exist (it's impossible and has been for more than a year now)
problems with 128 tick:
1) 128 tick is significantly harder for clients to run (yes, seriously. csgo was MUCH easier to run overall, so 64 -> 128 was barely noticeable for people who had high end 2023 systems)
2) much more expensive to run servers (people don't like to hear this, but the game servers are not free. even if valve makes a billion dollars a month, faceit/esportal/gamersclub do not, and according to the dev wiki it takes about 1.5x the CPU power to run 128 tick servers, which is significant as the CPUs to run a server are not cheap compared to other types of server hosting that exist)
this is a tough conversation to have, as there is one part of the playerbase who is VERY vocal (and a lot of the times very toxic) about the "state" of the game, while the game has:
1) never been more popular
2) never brought in more money
3) never made less people happy with the current state
I personally believe that the game should be unlocked at this point.
sorry for longpost, tl;dr is that 128 tick solves this issue from the OP i was QT'ing pretty quick, but it comes at a downside to client and server system requirements for all when the game is already harder to run than cs:go
In CS:GO, when you got backtracked, the game used to TP your viewangle backwards to show you that this happened. Maybe adding this affect back will improve player's perceptions of lag compensation?
People seem to have forgotten how this system actually works
@CounterStrike