I'm currently using Mod Organizer 2 and have 87 mods with 130 plugins installed (some of these plugins were merged using Merged Plugins), and each time I enter the strip I'm met with a barren desert with only a portion of the Lucky 38 and some bridges far away. When I walk there is no sound and pulling my pip-boy results in waiting for a long time before it pops up. When I try to fast travel it enters an infinite loading loop. Can the game recognize if I have merged plugins and thus I've already gone over the accepted plugin limit or is it something else? I've also reconstructed recently all the LODs I had using FNVLODGen so having new files might be an issue.

Edit: Counting all the plugins that were merged, I would supposedly have around 149 in total.

Do you use Strip/Freeside extended? Those are technically brand new maps, so you may be, for whatever reason, taken to the "Old" Strip, which is now an empty desert. Lucky 38, for example, is also just a barren desert world, it's just that you are always inside the lucky 38 while you're there, then you go back to the "Strip World" when you exit the lucky 38. Open Strip would be an entirely new world altogether, but since you said you merged some mods, maybe the door pointers still send you to the old strip world, for some reason

Was finally able to pinpoint the issue. It WAS my use of the FNVLODGen that caused the bug/glitch. I noticed that, before entering the Strip through the North Gate, the Lucky 38 tower had all of its textures messed up, so I tried disabling LOD related mods until I reached it. Not sure why but now the executable might be broken.