Would you still recommend Unity now that most of the storm has blown over? I was going learn it originally but then all that happened and now I dunno what engine to learn
There's a lot more I could say about the internal state of Unity, but I'd just consider what kind of games you want to make, and find an engine that matches. The reason I went with Unity in the first place is that it did these 3 things:
All coding can be done with a single non-proprietary language
Doesn't care about a hard divide between "2D" and "3D".
Can export to PC, Web, and consoles with no external tools.
I'm also a big fan of the object-based system Unity has going on! It lets me keep projects incredibly modular, and separate art from code when I need to. (eg: I can have a tween that scales a sprite to be the size of another sprite... and that other sprite I can just resize with editor tools.)
There's a bit more that's made me stay with Unity, but all of those are from the support of 3rd-party developers:
Good controller support (ReWired)
a good animation system (Mecanim, which is now Unity's internal animation system)
a convenient text renderer (Super Text Mesh... I spent 8 years on it! It's hard for me to drop!)
MIDI in *and* out support (DryWetMidi and keijiro's work)
Good tweening library (DOTween)
Good code editor (Rider)
I've been eyeing godot myself since it's similar in concept to Unity, but it doesn't have everything I need on my list, yet. It is quickly approaching though, and since the engine is open-source... I think it'll get there sooner than later.
So, I'd make a list of the kinds of features you want out of a game engine, and start comparing engines! For example, if you only want to make 2D games, maybe GameMaker or Monogame could be worth considering. Unity has a ton of 3rd party support from asset devs, which is what I feel makes it a strong contender for anything still. (I just wish we asset devs were treated with a bit more respect...!) I wouldn't worry about Unity going bankrupt or anything by the way, if that were to happen, either a) some dev would probably upload the source code on github the next day, or b) projects to convert Unity code to Godot code automatically will accelerate extremely quickly.
