To call Wilderness a shitshow would be unfair to shitshows.

For those OOTL, Wilderness is both the patch/content title and one of the play styles, where you take on the form of a whole entity rather than one made up of more individual individuals. Think Zerg/Tyranids but even more so than the game has tried before now.

Before you could play as a devouring swarm hive that still had drones for tasks the way regular empires had pops and you still used the same resources, although didn't bother with some because you never needed them.

Wilderness gave you the biomass resource which was basically you and used to make colonies.

Which was the biggest problem to the whole thing because Wilderness technically had 1 population ever, jobs were just auto filled to max capacity once buildings were made from biomass. This was similar to how the robot Virtual Ascension worked except you still had actual numbers there, they were just entirely software. Build a building for 600 more jobs, come the turn off the next month, you gain 600 new virtual pops. Which on the one hand meant no inherent pop growth unless you could make new jobs, but also if you had big enough planets, and fast enough building speed modifiers, you could outpace normal methods of pop gen by "printing" new ones. One of the major penalties of Virtual was linked to how many planets you had, it was "the" play tall pick and most players never went beyond 4 planets if they chose it. Conveniently it would grant the "shutdown server" option once fully unlocked so you could ditch colonies you didn't want and focus on your handful.

What goes wrong with Wilderness ties in to how population changed in 4.0. Planets used to have at most 25 or so pops because of how they were designed, with no real clear explanation how much 1 pop equalled. Then planets changed from the 5x5 tiles to the district system which meant you could have more than 25, but due to costs most planets would probably still have fewer than 100, unless it was something specific that benefited insanely despite the malus stacking that would happen.

4.0 changed things again so now roughly 1 pop became 100. You would now see big worlds with 80'000+ pops as things went on.

Except in Wilderness where pop was always 1. The wilderness entity itself forever.

So when some of the game events and mechanics that have been around for years did something like "remove 2k pops" this flat out deleted wilderness colonies because the PDX devs neither updated the old scripts to account for how wilderness worked, or bothered to properly test if their flagship mechanic would actually work properly.

And the same kinds of problems have been happening in countless other areas of the game to the point 4.0 has turned out like MegaCorps in terms of a release disaster as just like back the the devs ended up going on holiday shortly after release, this time because of mandated Swedish summer holidays, while last time was due to a Christmas break.