Even Gold can be comparable to Windows. Even silver, since a lot of games don't actually work well or at all on Windows anymore. At the same time, Platinum can still mean issues. It's not that black & white comparable when there's so many factors going into it (regardless of the OS).
If setting a simple setting is too much for you, which is also a 5 second search away if you're struggling that hard, then yeah, Linux is too much for you. But so is Windows.
Expansions are really not the same as "micro transactions" (now very much macro transactions). Expansions were typically content filled and had a fair price point, regardless if they shipped boxed on a CD or were packed into a digital download. Now we pay the price for a full sized expansion for a single cosmetic in some games.
You and OP might also like Foundation. It does not have the same graphics style unfortunately but it has no grid structure which makes your villages and cities look very organic.
Stylized graphics would have not helped with the performance, or the mismatching scale of objects & people, or the garbage UI structure, or the garbage game structure. The whole thing was just amateurish and cheap looking.
That also looks like it isn't performance like complete garbage. When I saw the first videos for Life By You I was kinda shocked that they even put that out to the public. I'm really not surprised they canned it.
Yeah. Pdx went the same shit route as EA by now, even have subscriptions too. Doesn't matter if I have to through hundreds of bucks at EA or Pdx for a single game. It's both the same shitty principle.