Async has no idea what they have on their hands.
Ivan Beck discovered nothing less than a dimension of pure energy (the green stuff) during the events of overflow and inadvertently bestowed upon it a form of consciousness or otherwise an underlying logic and that iitself s the creator of the complex we see in the series. It's not real, it's just energy pretending to be matter.
And in the same way Ivan Beck spent decades pursuing the project in search of something he lost (or thought he lost), this dimension is recreating our world looking for something it never had Form, I think. It's guided by experience and memory perhaps because those exist in a form most similar to it, in the only form it can understand. The lighting and tile survey hints of something else, too. Almost like it can peer into those spaces directly and recreate them in its own way. We know it's unbounded by time as we know it...
So if I had to guess the series is one long march towards this realization and confrontation, with the researchers and the found footage victims being the pawns that drive the story forward. Ivan Beck finds what he's looking for and it's just him, or rather the thing that imagined itself to be him, and it itself will find the thing it never could have created even with all the time that could ever exist... Or something I don't fucking know anymore. Maybe the whole thing collapses in on itself and California is obliterated from the map, but leaves humanity the gift of infinite energy in its wake.