There's a section in the FAQ dedicated to GG&S.

To sum up the consensus view: the book stinks. Shoddy methodology and a flawed understanding of history on the part of the author, who is not a historian.

If you're looking for similar books, u/Tiako recommends (with qualifications) "Why the West rules (for now)" by Ian morris.

The book is very similar in scope to GG&S, but it's written by a historian who knows his business much better and has a truly immense amount of research and data backing it up.

To quote Tiako: (And hoping his opinions haven't seesawed again since he wrote this)

I have very much seesawed in my opinion of the book. When I first read it, I was very much of the "This work can do no wrong" camp, and even the problems I identified with it (by the far the most petty, but still most annoying, being the misinterpretation of Machiavelli) I ignored. When I looked at it again, the problems were far more glaring, and I started to think of it as a very good but light weight work of popular history. It wasn't until I looked through the supplementary material (which is fascinating, by the way) that I realized how absurdly well researched the work is and clarified several of the points I had objections to, which helped me to really appreciate it again.

It's also very well written. I heartily recommend it. Just be aware of the flaws, going in. (The review lists them. But my version: any work of this scope has to take a lot of short-cuts, make a lot of comparisons between stuff that really doesn't lend itself very well to comparisons and whilst it can offer valuable insights you should never mistake it for gospel truth. Also, more specifically to Morris, his specialisation is Ancient History and it shows. His section on the early modern age in Europe, in particular, is very bare-bones.)

This topic has more alternate titels you might want to check out.

So does this one, but it's older and offers less justification for its recommendations.

If you mean Diamond's theory for the rise and fall of polities and civilizations, then there are competing theories. I am reading War and Peace and War by Peter Turchin, which makes the argument that successful empires are formed on or near major civilizational boundaries, where conflict with other groups of people forces individuals in a polity to cooperate and make sacrifices for the greater good. This cooperation leads to social cohesion and military dominance over the surrounding areas. Decline and collapse comes when wealth inequality degrades the social cohesion, leading to civil wars and making a country vulnerable to foreign invasion.