It's one of the only space based sci-fi shows with mostly realistic physics.

Only at the beginning. As soon as the protomolecule shows up, all the weird stuff comes back. Like, stargates, force fields, telepathy...

Well, for something extraterrestrial that has been sent to our system billions of years ago by an advanced civilization that cannot really be understood by humans, I guess artistic license is okay. The human stuff still works with mostly realistic physics (with the Epstein drive the main exception, which is needed to actually enable the world).

And even with the epstein drive they still show acceleration and deceleration changing at the mid point of the journey. They don't have inertial dumpers like star trek invented to work around the issue.

What do you mean? It's not like the ships "stop" when the drive is turned off.

It's implied they generate gravity on the ships by burning the engines* and the engines seem to burn all the time, so you can assume for half of every trip they are accelerating towards destination and the other half they are decelerating again.

Orbital mechanics seems to only apply when convenient, e.g. an orbital mirror around a moon is damaged and "falls" straight down. I don't think that is accurate, even assuming the loss of atation-keeping thrust.

* Not real gravity, but you can't tell the difference between gravity and acceleration. And they also account for high-G manoveurs being difficult/deadly for humans.

Ah, I thought he was giving an argument why the Epstein drive was unrealistic, since his tone was agreeing with the parent.

Protomolecule stuff, though a key to about 1/3 of the plot points, is pretty much the only "out there" stuff in the show. So sure, it seems to break a few laws of physics, but the whole story is about humans using realistic technology confronted with the unknown and the impossible.

Beyond that, the books are pretty hard. The only one physics-bending technology used by humans is the Epstein drive, and as a drive it doesn't really violate any laws of physics (it's a fusion drive) - the unrealistic part is its absurdly good fuel efficiency.

And even that was self-aware as in they did background scenes on its development (eg not just arm wavey)

Force fields are plausible, but FTL (including telepathy and stargates) are what ruins it. However, it's one big exception that almost all space-based sci-fi allows.