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.
Those % to hit chances are all effected by the location of your character in relation to them. The Flanking bonus alone takes impossible shots and makes them near guaranteed. Standing point blank to the enemy means a whole lot, and anyone whose ever actually played the game knows it. Everything visual is relevant under that umbrella and disproves your entire point. If you want to drag it to pedantic, literally every game could do without visuals and just be a number on the screen and accomplish the same thing.
The problem with the "95% chance to hit" meme is that its brought on by lack of information. There are a lot of pure raw numbers going on behind the scenes to make that final one, and often times your starting units just literally lack a high enough number even with every advantage multiplier to get to 100%. The game doesn't explain its own mechanics other than a vague notion that is good enough but leaves you with a lot of those Xcom Moments of confusion when they happen.
But that's why the most popular mod for the game was a literal higher difficulty, more complexity one. Because once you have access to more information the game becomes a lot more manageable and predictable to a point of needing more difficulty to return the challenge.
Both of the new Xcoms are littered with issues, like the retarded stealth and pod mechanics, but the RNG to hit thing isn't are egregious as it seems once you actually understand what its calculating and how to work within it (grenades bandaid everything).
I've played the literal Card Battle game that Firaxis made after Xcom 2 (Midnight Sun) and it plays nothing like Xcom.
Even understanding why the hit rates are the way they are, it doesn't align anywhere close with reality. An elite commando unit, that misses shots that are only yards away, or even point blank, it just pure frustration. It doesn't make logical sense, unless the characters you're controlling are untrained retards with the worst vision on the planet. No amount of "but we need it for gameplay balance" will overcome that disalignment with reality and reason.
That type of gameplay makes the player realize that the gameplay revolves around babysitting retards that couldn't tie their shoes without somehow dying horribly (oops, the 99% chance you had to succeed somehow rolled a negative crit, causing the shoelaces to somehow pierce the brain and kill your character, and the character behind him). That type of gameplay logic occurs in many more games than just X-Com, too, and is why I no longer play them. It's a souring experience.
The retarded part is that they clearly want your starter soldiers to be random retards barely out of Boot, but for story reasons they are supposed to be Elites already. Its one thing Xcom 2 does better. In that random Guerilla fighters make a lot more sense than the World's Best like Xcom 1 had. I won't defend it though because its a terrible integration of Narrative and Gameplay.
I like how Alien Dark Descent did it a lot better. Where the accuracy level is effected by their increasing fear/stress levels and you have actual control of accessing that risk and working to minimize it so you don't spiral out of control.
Apart from all the friendlies you "team up" with during Retaliation missions that are determined to plink every single alien possible which means you end up with a billion Codex clones, enraged Muton Berserkers, and perma-shelled Gatekeepers. 🙄
Its amazing how they managed to turn reinforcements, which provide completely free meatshields and extra damage, into a bad thing.