It's just transparent. It feels like alot of lessons were learned from the broken abstractions of older ecs engines. It might not be as powerful yet, but the foundation is solid and it's easy to implement the more complicated stuff.

Also, dotnet 6 implementation is a breath of fresh air.

The way it's designed is just nice - in unity if you're trying to do something the engine doesn't do by default, it feels like you're almost fighting it. But in Godot a lot of the engine's built in features are just things you can add yourself - resources, nodes, and editor plugins.

Also, support for serializing/deserializing dictionaries. When I used unity a few years ago it didn't have that feature and afaik it still doesn't.

Small, lightweight, open source, a large active community, and honestly even gdscript has started to grow on me

It's lightweight (~350mb after decompression, I'm not fooled by the small executable), fast startup, generates relatively small executables, compiles to several platforms

I'm not learned enough in Unity or UE to make proper equivalent benchmarks to see who makes faster 2D or 3D stuff

GDScript being pretty much syntathically identical to Python makes it simple to learn and understand, which I enjoy. I've yet to learn how to use nodes, which I suppose won't be too different from Blender's? Don't know how to mess with those either

The scene tree based approach just clicked with me well.

Open source. Cross-platform.

And to quote the documentation: No strings attached, no royalties, nothing.