X-Com 1 and 2 (new versions) are great games, even if they moved away from the large squad slaughter that was Enemy Unknown, terror from the deep and partially Apocalypse. I personally really enjoyed looking at black sections of the map and thinking "that will cost 3 rookies to explore"
Everyone is aware of the "95% to hit meme" around X-Com, and if you've played Phoenix Point, the difference is especially jarring. If you haven't, aiming in that game is purely a probability cone, so standing point blank next to an alien means something. In X-Com it doesn't mean diddly squat.
I finally figured out what the problem with X-Com is, and why it's always uniquely frustrating. With it's pod based mechanics, fake stealth and drip fed enemies. What you are seeing on screen has no relevance and only serves as a distraction. Being right next to an Alien and missing is irrelevant because where the character and alien are on screen do not correlate with the game.
X-Com is, for all intents and purposes a very fun card battle game. If it were a Dos prompt game, with exactly 0 visuals, nothing would be lost.
Try it next time you play, completely ignore the visuals and imagine your character as a card drawing a dice based attack against another card.
It means a 'lid is about to eat you.
In all seriousness, in X-Com 2 it meant more crit which was of particular use to Rangers using shotguns.
There are mods to fix this.
And this. Various difficulty mods exist that either flat out buff mobs, like Beta Strike so you won't be 1 shotting entire pods, or The Hive which can end up throwing so many 'lids at you that you really do need to specifically build loadouts for them, namely Bladestorm Rangers, otherwise you're not going to have enough AP to deal with the never ending waves of teeth and claws.
Yeah, no. This isn't true in the slightest, and again especially for X-Com 2. You gain bonus aim for being higher than a target. Sharpshooters gain even more stats from this as well as learning perks like Death from Above that grant an AP return if you kill something with a shot. Positioning is vital in some situations where you can block off ladders being used by Lost and if you are lucky enough to have the Between the Eyes park then you can pistol fire down every Lost in range and LoS providing you have the sharpshooters or modded classes which also take a pistol. Early game it can matter so much that Gatecrasher goes from a suicide run in Holland to shooting fish in a barrel in Hong Kong - this references Holland being flat and HK having more skyscrapers than anywhere else. Position, both elevation and proximity, absolutely fucking matter in early game.
Seriously, have you actually played these games are you literally just falling back on the first line of your second paragraph?
It's a meme because people remember missing a 95% shot. Same reason Repeater executes are mostly remembered because they are low RNG, then even more so when it ends up 1 shotting something like an Alien Ruler or Ethereal hybrid with 40++ hp. So a 95% miss which causes a TPK gets remembered far more than one which at worst fails to stop a 'lid eating another civvie.
This doesn't even work as an example either because there are card games which do care where you place things. Gwent from The Witcher 3 has actual combat locations: Close Combat, Ranged, and Siege. There are effect cards which can specifically target those locations or the entire map which then significantly change how a game might turn out.
For example: Biting Frost - Sets the strength of all Close Combat cards to 1 for both players.
Followed by: Villentretenmerth - Scorch - Close Combat: Destroy your enemy's strongest Close Combat unit(s) if the combined strength of all his or her Close Combat units is 10 or more.
If there are 10 cards in the CC locations, of which the Monster deck in particular will easily manage, then you destroy every single card with a two-card combo, which even the Witcher wiki points out.
Your entire opinion post reads like that of a casual tourist who asked ChatGPT to summarise X-Com and lacked the knowledge base to know whether the result was complete garbage or not.