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.
Getting the drop made such a huge difference that the entire strategy in EU was "Overwatch Spam and slow crawl." It was so effective that the expansion and the entire sequel was built to break the ability for it to work with time limits and force different strategies. Said sequel proceeded to have an entire stealth mechanic added in to give you an alternative to getting the drop, and guys up there are talking that the stealth focused hero lets you almost solo missions with how strong getting the drop on alien pods is.
Like, it cannot be overstated how completely wrong that sentence is. And it furthers my theory that a lot of people's complaints about the game were just they were bad at it.
And it didn't even work at first. 'The Beaglerush Maneuver' specifically "exploited" overwatch by having a soldier intentionally set off a patrol during the alien turn by standing out in the open. The pod would then try to run for cover only to get caught in an overwatch trap.
This was hot fixed so that any pod stumbling upon a soldier in the open like this would instead just shoot the very flanked X-Com operative, which meant a lot of bonuses to the attack being made and likely a soon to be very dead X-Com operative.