I have only heard of exalted in one notch above "it exists". And I really appreciate your insight posts, because just from your summaries I feel like I have contracted AIDS from reading them and I can't imagine how utterly massively pozzed the raw source material must be.
The corebook of 3e is 2014, so it's before the poz became inescapable in TTRPGs and it was really like a more mechanically sane version of the original early 2000s White Wolf game. But like I said, every subsequent book got worse and worse. The original was woke in the same way other White Wolf games of the time were 'woke'. It was pretty explicit that everyone in the world is some shade of brown, homosexuality is no big deal, etc., but it wasn't constantly in your face. The biggest problem were always Lunar Exalted, since the way they're set up, they can be done sanely, but they're huge furry bait with some twists that just make them worse.
Like you probably noted from my previous posts, there's multiple types of Exalts: Solars (the default PCs, strongest, reborn in a world that rightfully hates and fears them), Dragon-blooded (the only Exalt type where Exaltation is carried through family, weakest, most numerous, overthrew the Solar Exalts in distant past once their rule became tyrannical and corrupt, currently ruling a decaying tyrannical and corrupt empire), Abyssals (Corrupted Solars, edgelords bent on destroying all of Creation), Sidereals (the ones manipulating everything), Infernals (when demons stole the Exaltations that would eventually become Abyssals, they kept some for themselves), Alchemical (mechanical), and, of course, Lunars.
Lunars have bestial features, can change into animals, usually live in the wild, usually have some sort of tribal culture, and, to attract an especially deranged breed of furries, each one is a destined soulmate of a specific Solar Exalted. In the original books, it's pretty clear that that's a problem, since the Solars haven't been around for thousands of years and Lunars have developed their own ideas in the meantime. Most players are kind of lukewarm on Lunars, since they fill a role in the setting (manageable threat to a group of young Dragon-Blooded) and there's drama potential with them, but they come with baggage. The players who like Lunars are generally furries and they also really, really like Lunars. It was the second kind of players who got put in charge of Lunars for the third edition.
Exalted is cool, it really is. But like all original White Wolf things, the cool parts of it come with a lot of shit attached. And unlike oWoD, which got a complete mechanically decent version in the 20th Anniversary edition, the only mechanically good part of 3e is the core book, while 1e and 2e both have huge issues.
