I have had the original ReMarkable since 2018. Since then, the software has significantly improved.
The Remarkable 2 is slightly thinner, has longer battery life and is cheaper than the origional.
It really does feel very close to paper, and the fact that you can scribble on top of PDFs and ePubs really means that it is great for reading scientific papers and technical books.
Main drawbacks it currently still has is that there is no stable Linux client to sync the documents with. Your best bet is to use either the Mac/Windows client or — what I do since I only have a Linux-environment — use the Android client on my phone instead.