If you’re not averse to piracy, you could go that route.
If you are averse to piracy, and have consoles to play on, buy used copies of games (where it’s even possible to) - the publisher sees no proceeds from that.
Failing that… There’s a lot of great indie games out there that aren’t problematic. I know it feels like you’re missing out if you aren’t playing whatever the current big AAA game is, but really, there’s plenty of indie games that are just as good, or that you’d get just as much enjoyment out of.
It’s weird to claim that only Japanese creators can make JRPGs. That’s not true at all, it just implies a specific style of gameplay, not the country of origin.
Not OP, but for me, it was gameplay. I’ve tried multiple times to get into that game, but the gameplay just detracts so heavily from it (for me personally) that I haven’t been able to get into or enjoy (if ‘enjoy’ is even the right word) the story.
You’re basically playing PoE like an incremental game. Your first character advances at a glacial pace, and dies. Your stash is basically prestige currency your next character can draw from to be faster. And so on and so forth.
There was a (recent) PCGamer article that specifically called out stash tabs as being something that would be shared… I don’t know if they were basing that on anything or just speculating, but as you note, it seems obvious that that mechanic would be in both games.
They’ve said that all microtransactions from PoE1 will carry over to PoE2, which implies that all of those stash tab requirements will still exist, and we can presume they’ll just keep adding more.
Unfortunately, “not tolerating this BS” just means “Not buying from them”, and by the time you see that it’s a problem, it’s too late for that. Even if this was a clear-cut case of them breaking some law, which it isn’t, it’s Apple; they have more money than God, and you’d never successfully sue them before they bankrupted you.
Calling this glitchless is a little misleading, unless you’re suggesting that carrying spells over from one run to the next was intended / normal functionality. This also requires a mod-constructed wand that isn’t possible to get in a non-modded game.
It’s still awesome from a theorycrafting standpoint, but there’s no one arguing that this is a legitimate speedrun.