Confirmed, it just shows the model the player has selected.
I made a video for the original post I made but forgot to link it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAQGYqmm-1g
edit: This video was made a couple updates ago, but it's still broken.
Your video shows cl_min_t/cl_min_ct, not cl_minmodels. Every time you change cl_min_t or cl_min_ct, you need to toggle cl_minmodels on/off for the changes to take affect I think (on Linux).
I cannot reproduce this, if I join a server running the beta with cl_minmodels set to 1 and then set cl_min_ct to 4 (for example) then the mode immediately changes (as designed). Are you using a listen server when doing this testing? Or a random server on the internet? If it is a random server please post its ip.
I'm starting a listenserver via new game from the menu.
Huh, well now I have no idea, I will test some more to see if I can break it.
I've tested cl_minmodels on different servers on Windows, and it doesn't seem to work at all. I can't really test on a listen server since there are no bots. This shouldn't be server dependant anyway, should it ?
Okay, found it, horrible memory overwrite bug if you connected to a server. Sigh.
After the addition of cl_min_ct/cl_min_t (https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/1127), cl_minmodels seem to be broken on Windows. It doesn't have any effect. It works fine on Linux.