Monster types in Pathfinder 2e

So the second edition Pathfinder rules have showed up on the online SRD sites. The formatting is terrible, but I was able to look past that.

Anyway, I wanted to address the monster types. Monster types are one of those rules that D&D and its derivatives have generally executed horribly. Pathfinder in particular had an atrocious type mechanic that was used to determine combat statistics. This new edition seems to have just adopted a similar mechanic as D&D5e, which has its own problems but I'll address those soon. So let's see how PF2 has revised its mechanics...

So the list of monster types is aberration, animal, astral, beast, celestial, construct, dragon, elemental, ethereal, fey, fiend, fungus, giant, humanoid, monitor, ooze, and undead. Let's not kid ourselves: this is a shameless copy of the 5e type mechanic with slight changes. Compared to 5e, PF2 subtracted the monstrosity type (good riddance!) and added the animal, astral, ethereal, fungus, and monitor types.

Unsurprisingly, PF2 hasn't learned from its mistakes so some of the types still have stupid arbitrary baggage rules attached, like elementals not needing to breathe. So an air elemental or fire elemental can survive just fine in the vacuum of space. That doesn't make any logical sense and it isn't thematic either.

PF2 divides 5e's beast type into animal and beast type, with the only distinction being that animals are limited to low intelligence. While this isn't an improvement over 5e's beast type (which covers all intelligence ranges), it is a massive improvement over PF1 which divided the same things into animals, magical beasts and vermin. Now animals may be ahistorical or have magical abilities: the ankheg and griffon are now typed as animals. Yay!

The PF2 beast type is unnecessary and nonsensical. Centaurs are typed as beasts, whereas medusae, merfolk, and minotaurs are typed as humanoids. Speaking of humanoids, the distinction between giants and humanoids is now fuzzier than ever. All giants are at least large size, but humanoids may be of at least large size too (e.g. minotaurs). So what gives?

The astral, ethereal, and monitor types were thrown in to cover corner cases. Astral creatures are from the astral plane, ethereal creatures from the ethereal plane, and monitors from the neutral planes. There isn't a type for creatures from the shadow plane or any other obscure planes, so it's up in the air what those will be typed.

So there are distinct types for good and evil (celestial and fiend), but chaotic, lawful and neutral are thrown into the monitor type. Because D&D and its clones use a stupid alignment system in which law and chaos play second fiddle to good and evil. I think that's stupid and vastly prefer 4e's origins tagging mechanic; if you need a type specifically for whatever aligned beings are supposed to be, then just add an immortal type or something.

The fungus type... dear God. Do we really need a fungus type of all things? Can it really not be covered by a tag applied to some plants and oozes?

In short, the new monster types mechanic is a marked improvement over PF1 but overall much worse than 5e. How difficult is it to devise a non-hierarchical tagging mechanic with separate tags for planar origin or whatever? 4e was vastly superior but these idiot writers keep ignoring its improvements because of stupid grognards complaining about it being too similar to MMOs.

Dear God. This isn't effing rocket science!