Stop listening to these nikkas man.
The show is not on the same timeline as the games because the games have a singular focus which is you as the MC fighting the covenant.
This show is on the "silver team timeline". The Spartans minus John aren't even the original 200.
The point of this show is to show the combat BUT focus on the human aspect which is what all the books do. Yes the UNSC is this evil. Yes Halsey is a kidnapping psycho. That's what makes this rendition so dope.
There are mad books and comics that point to all this colony shyt. In the books the colonies fight the covenant head up. In the books the covenant team up with the colonies against other covenant.
This is actually the Halo universe. The games never depicted anything close to the real depth and complexity of the story. Mass effect is more Halo than Halo.
My problem with the show is that its basically a cheap scifi fan fiction. It screams as its being someone that read the cliff notes of the books so they could throw out lore elements to appease halo fans, but would rather disposition us to death about the whys behind character actions then actually show them in a creative way.
I'm not asking it to follow the lore word from word, but when you turn Reth into a jackal trying to prove his loyalty to the covenant by forming an "alliance" with humans in Rubble to a cliche crazy survivor character the show just comes off as low effort, quick way to inevitably get to higher arching story line of the halo rings.
Edit: with the amount of lore in the Halo EU if they really wanted to actually tell their own story, they probably could've spent a lot more time on the war with the insurrectionist and actually explain why thats going on instead of saying, hey, "here's Chief, Cortana, Halsey and some Elites guys! this is totally halo right?"