I had played a bit before A20 but it was a long time ago and I am not sure which version that was.
I never had installed any mods and do not have a mod folder in my local drive.
I went through the steps in the blue banner to clean the game files and update to the latest beta but am still experiencing the same issue.
I guess my last option to try reinstalling the game, but would this delete the progress that I have made on my friend's dedicated server which seems to work fine for me?
*upon further exploring, it seems that some buildings/POI's are loading up, just not the majority of them
I also did a verify integrity of game files as suggested and steam found no issues