He's definitely someone who'd be defined more by the people around him than anything. The cleanest summary of him I've seen was that he was likable and competent but generally bad at coming up with ideas of his own: he was never some secret anticommunist mastermind schemer who fooled everyone around him for decades, just kind of a capable but gullible guy who was a good communist when surrounded by communists and an anti-communist stooge when surrounded by anti-communist sucdems and liberals.

I don't know what Katushev's "reform" polices are supposed to be in that tree: if its liberalization then it's basically just painting Gorbachev as a contrarian who'll act against the status quo just because, which I don't think is accurate considering how much he relied on the people around him to actually guide policy.

"Neo-Stalinist Gorbachev" is a good bit, though.