Entirely true.
I’m currently working on a little project that’s interesting to me (a low-spoiler walkthrough system for adventure games) and after a lot of back and forth, I decided to cut all of JS out of the picture. Just get rid of all of it, and do good old 90s server-side rendered HTML with modern CSS placed on top of it.
And that’s, honestly, a joy. The first draft of a page looks like the first screenshot, then you add some semantic classes to the html and throw some simple CSS at it and it looks acceptably neat. And I could get rid of so much janky toolchain I just fail to understand.
Catan just feels weird. The thing is - and I kinda validated that recently by watching highlevel competetive play of the catan base game, but: You only have like 2-4 meaningful decisions in a game. The rest is just follow through and dice.
And these things aren’t that hard to see at a decent level. And when you make these decent decisions, you mostly just win. Even with the robber, there’s limited counterplay to these good initial choices. This makes it hard to play casually as well once you know the good things.