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.
In harder difficulties/battles, it forces the player to move their characters very slowly to compensate for that unfair mechanic. So if an enemy is spotted, at least it's at maximum range, and gives the player more chances to counter it. In addition to what I listed in an above comment, this adds another layer of frustration to these types of games, and why I no longer play them.
And that slow movement was directly cited as the "wrong way" to play by the game's director, which is why he added a very low time limit to basically every mission in Xcom 2. Which had a mod to remove it within like 2 days of release for how much everyone hated that idea, and I believe one that doubles it is even a baseline difficulty option now.
The Pod system heavily punishes speed, which worked in EU/EW because it worked as a soft stealth approach to all missions in exchange for being a bit boringly slow at points. Xcom 2 throws that out the window and basically forces you to make bad decisions in the name of "speed" because you will literally die unless you use every single blue move going towards the objective.
Initially the game rewarded moving slowly, which is why they added the controversial meld mechanic.
As amended, an aggressive strategy that risked your soldiers had long term rewards.
This is why Reapers were so OP in WotC. They could end up telling you everything about a map and do so while in stealth and often almost right next a hostile. Getting them before the other factions could literally make or break some playthroughs they were that good.
I didn't realize you could get reapers. Actually, I may not have played with WotC because I was done with the game before the expansion came out. I get your point tho.
One of the best things about X-Com 2 is that is was made alongside planned workshop content, which is why Long War Studio/Pavonis was able to release 3 content mods on release day because Firaxis had not only been working with them to help improve the workshop setup for launch, but also letting them play test things. It's why the actual upload dates for those 3 mods are before the release day.
Later on LWS/Pavonis would release the actual Long War 2 mod which included the 3 smaller mods and a whole revamp of the game which gave it a refreshing second wind between the original release and eventual War of the Chosen DLC which yet again revamped how the baseline game worked.
Throw in all the various other mods and you got a game with at least 3 ish "official" modes and a lot of other PGCs/Player Generated Content that meant significantly more content than most games would have expected from just the official devs.