Input System broken

What is happening with the Input System?
I am starting to agree with folks that have been complaining for years that Unity is a spaghetti of half-working code. Decided to pickup a project I had from a few months ago, that was built with the new Input System. All worked fine, so decided to bump it up to latest Alpha. Noticed that VS Code intellisense wasn't working and the references to the InputSystem was marked in red. Ok, I am thinking, gonna try and revert to the latest stable release: 2021.2.3f1 - Of course project got messed up, as I expected. Couldn't fix it, but it was a relatively small project, mostly foundation, so I decided to rebuild it from scratch in the 2021.2.3f1. Start clean, new project, import Input System, create Controls, bam: same error. Every time I try to rebuild all cs files, tried with both New and Both backends...nothing. Checked the manuals in case anything was added to the installation steps, checked 100 posts on SO and Unity...I mean...if you can't even get it started from a clean project, following the 1 page manual...cmon guys...
Can't even get to the fun stuff.
And not even gonna comment on the Input System on its own, which once again was made overly confusing and complicated, where you can achieve the same or similar result by following completely different paths. The only thing this results in is tons of confused people and a bunch of weird tutorials. And so many years later, we are still at the point where for most indie devs by the time you setup the basics: movement, physics, inputs, env. lighting...well you are so exhausted that any will to actually do the fun things is likely gone...
Sorry for the rambling, but this is probably the 150-th time I sit down with best of intentions and great enthusiasm, just to be crushed by Unity.

 

What error are you getting?

It took me a good few times before I managed to get it working, but it's worked every time since for me. I am using 2020.3.1f1 though.

 

Yes, strangely enough I had it working on 2020 as well. But you would think there are no regressions like that at least in the stable releases.