I think there is some merit to the argument that SR is... frankly... a very high powered (some may say zany, but it tends to be good at internally accounting for the fact PC 'tiers' of PCs are so powerful 99% of the setting can't meaningfully stop them, only slow them down. HTR, focusing on security and stalling tools in architecture via locking doors or cover or smoke poppers, ect) setting that allows PCs to do things so well that trying to accurately model little nitty gritty penalties may seem weird.
However, there is also some merit to it. As many people have pointed out, the fact that penalties exist favor the PCs quite heavily, even when the modifiers are equal to both offense and defense (And they often aren't, if someone tosses a smoke grenade in the middle of a room and both sides are taking -3 to hit because they have to sensor target, who is going to benefit more, the 20 defense dice, 20 attack dice street samurai, or the 12 defense dice, 8 attack dice corpsec team?).
But also, said penalties help contextualize the superhuman abilities of runners (and some of their opponents). A street samurai is more agile than the most agile human in existence because they literally replaced their muscles, sees time in slow motion because they stripped out the nerve endings in their spine, and can see bullet trajectories and calculate wind speeds and air pressure using a mini-super computer in their eyes. It helps you really wrap your head around how good that street samurai is when they can hit 4 different moving targets in the span of 3 seconds not even bothering to use the sights of their pistol at 60 meters out in a rainstorm. It helps contextualize that 8 dice to hit is quite fine for a human (because most people in real life use the aim action to boost their hit rate and semi-auto burst) but is pathetic compared to a superhuman cyborg straight out of cyberpunk fiction like Molly Millions or The Major.
Is the complexity worth that little extra bit of flavor-mechanical link? Maybe. You could easily get rid of it by focusing more dice into gear and 'ware so that the gap naturally is just bigger all the time and corpsec roll fewer dice, but with the new mechanic of attack rating it seems like the gap isn't just shrinking, but borderline going away, and I think that is what is spooking people the most. Low complexity modifier situations are fine enough as a mechanic, you will always get people freaking out over them because that is a big change for SR but they aren't inherently bad, but we also are seeing a very big focus on attacking the concept of the superhuman SR PC, which I think is a more radical departure from the game's entire history.
It isn't hard to notice that the changes to damage code, soak, and edge are pushing it so that PCs take more damage but are also dying less when they take damage. It feels like the goal is to make SR way more focused on 'fair' fights ala D&D where your fighter is taking hits but giving em out in equal measure, which the game has never really been about and isn't why people enjoy the game line. I think another good reason people are spooked a bit is because it isn't like street samurai were oppressive. They served to in a way show you immediately that you couldn't run SR as a combat grinder game, because SR's street samurai never got ground down in combat ever. The interesting vulnerability they had wasn't taking damage over time, but the fact that a street samurai's ability to help their team is very 'localized.' They can't do things in rooms they aren't in, which every other PC type can do. It forces you as a GM to not view a straight up combat where the stakes are just 'maybe a PC will die' as an interesting thing, because, frankly, it isn't interesting in most RPGs because killing a player character in a remotely noticeable percentage of fights in any RPG, no matter how fast the chargen is, creates an incoherent story where your cast is constantly rotating out and you can't really grow attached to the character's personal tale.
As someone else said, the playtesting sample size quality really shows and it feels like it was playtested on people who really enjoyed 5e D&D and its focus on gradual healing resource loss rather than cunning plans, non-dice/death based fail-states, and intense explosive set-piece actions. That may be intentional, maybe its an attempt to make SR more mainstream, but this is coming at a really huge cost I don't think most people would want to pay.
Combat now is in a way that splitting the team to do different tasks, something SR did so well its almost the game's main mechanic, not realistic because your just too vulnerable now. Samurai PC can't trash a room full of grunts anymore, which was a huge appeal of the role, and don't seem to do anything that well, so unless the resources to be a samurai go way down to allow them to hybridize their role we likely won't be seeing mundane combat characters that often. Dramatic, intense infiltration or exfiltrations that depend on the overwhelming force a samurai can apply in a single area... don't exist? It feels now like... D&D but with guns?
In essence, I think the question that needs to be answered here isn't "Are simplified vs complex contextual modifiers good or bad" or "How does this affect the relationship between PCs and NPCs?" The first is totally opinion (though the fact that this system depends on GM fiat constantly probably means it will be more annoying than the old table system and make this game really unpopular with 'low confidence' players who get nervous and have negative experiences when they don't know what is going on or what to expect, who are totally valid and make up a huge portion of the RPG demographic), and the second is obvious. The real question to ask is "How does this change the actual way SR is played, and if it removes core elements of the line, what does it replace them with?" We seem to be in a similar area with what was done to 5e riggers and hackers where there was a huge design focus on eliminating a 'problem' rather than making the systems enjoyable to use, though much like trying to stop powerful drones or remote hackers, I am very skeptical soak tanks and overwhelming PC advantage vs grunts without superpowers like them was a problem.
So like... what is the actual appeal of SR6? Why is it good? Why is it fun? Simplification can help a fun game be MORE fun by getting rid of the unfun stuff, and complexity can hide the fun, but neither of these things are fun. If SR6 was designed purely to be more simple, that is fine, but if it sacrifies the enjoyable aspects of SR... then no amount of simplification will make it good. Maybe if we saw new amazing actions that huff edge like no tomorrow that make samurai really valuable in combat, or really neat things that require a ton of skillpool and consistency people would have more confidence in the combat systems, but as is it just seems like the soul was ripped out of it, not because situational mods are gone, I again could see a reality where they entirely went away, but because so many babies were thrown out with the bathwater here and the GM fiat edge system as simplification is being mistaken for an interesting fun system.
If SR6 is going out of its way to make it so I don't have anything to sink my teeth into and is trying to make every interaction essentially GM adjudicated, why on earth should I play it? This is not a rhetorical 'you screwed up' question (Unless you literally can't answer it, in which case that bodes EXTREMELY poorly for the future of 6e), but a serious question that needs to be answered if anyone is going to get hype for 6e: Give me something I am going to love, don't advertise how little I am going to hate it.
I am not saying it is going to be bad, but I am saying nothing here displays why it is GOOD, and the fact that there is such a pushback about the objective truth of what global mods did to interactions between PCs and NPCs really doesn't build confidence. Like people played and loved exalted 1e despite the fact it was a total hot mess because Exalted gave you something to love, and the fixes to 1e in the form of scroll of Errata didn't try to stop the things people enjoyed despite some of them being way too good, but just made the experience more cohesive. People love 3.5 D&D despite its balance being terrible, because there is something there good. SR3e, 4e, and 5e all also are loved by many people because they all do some things truly excellently. Balance and design is important, do not get it twisted, a big thing hurting SR is the callous treatment of balance, but most RPGs that people love are loved because they evoke truly great experiences more than the fact they have no pointy edges that can cut you.
This isn't getting into the fact that while SR isn't a simulationist game that edge generation is so jarring in terms of effect that it actively takes people out of the experience or that it is really hard to come up with environmental scenarios that make sense. Those issues can just be fixed by the Gm ALSO using situational modifiers, and its weird that the designers tried to remove those from the game entirely rather than just reduce their scope and complexity. It doesn't excuse their absence, but the real game design sin here seems to just be that combat seems... lame. Where is the hype? Cmon, show me some cool new samurai supermoves! everyone else is getting new stuff why am I, a hypothetical samurai player in this imagined dialogue, just getting worse and less interesting?!?
SR6 already HAS done some things that have built hype a bit in my mind: The reduction in decker prices and focus on splitting the purchases means that now hybrid deckers can work hypothetically, so now I can finally play my old and sour combat decker who was hacking when the internet was still a thing! The changes to metatypes are legit great because now I can play whatever I want whenever I want and not ruin my PC and oh my god what are these race specific benefits you can buy going to be? That is legit hype generation. But the combat systems did the opposite of that by seemingly constraining the space as much as possible and not even being a good simplified system in my mind because it leans too hard on the GMs whims. Like other games that have GM adjudicated modifiers rather than a set table tend to do it in a way where the player has control over it (ex: Fate and tagging aspects being a thing players always do) for a reason.
Or; TL:DR:
"You shouldn't want everyone to like your game, or be afraid that some people will bounce off it. You should make sure some people LOVE your game." Mark Rosewater, paraphrased.
There are plenty of grinder combat game systems out there and if I love SR I actually probably don't love them, judging by how many people like to be mean to people transitioning from D&D to SR on reddit. Why should I love this new edition of SR6's combat that just makes the crunchy combat I liked simpler and more grindy? Don't tell me what I am not going to hate, tell me what I will like!