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.
You're very wrong about the accuracy thing, but dead on with the pod mechanic. Inactive pods don't behave in a realistic way, and the turn based system means that being spotted by an alien can mean instant ruin if it happens at the end of your turn. The player shouldn't be punished for taking actions in the wrong order if it's not possible to know what the correct order is.
I can't personally think of a way to remedy it without just removing the "entire team goes at once" mechanic, but it's uniquely frustrating to accidentally reveal the wrong tile and basically give the aliens a free turn. Activating a pod should at least give your entire team free overwatch or something.
Mods can help with some of the AI issues, the stealth thing is actually intentional design where pods move towards a fireteam.
This ends up as more of an experience thing in the reboots that comes down to slowly moving up a map and never double dashing - blue and yellow moves at the same time - unless you're doing something drastic like running a Bladestorm Ranger/Templar into a pod because you know it will scatter than and Bladestorm will still mean several attacks of opportunity. Templars are slightly better for this than Rangers as sometimes a Templar can learn Fortress which prevents fire damage, so accidentally meleeing a Purifier with a flamethrower doesn't end up being lethal.
It used to in the original if you left soldiers with enough AP.