I don’t have much if an opinion on the rest of your argument but:

probably before most people started realizing it was being trained off stolen artwork as well as a lot of the other problems with AI.

This is the equivalent to those Tesla owners pasting “I bought this before Elon went crazy” stickers. Especially the creative industries were very quick to point out the problematic part of stuff like Dall-E and stable diffusion. Generative Graphical AI has never been approved of by the gamedevs I know.

Spheres of Chaos is an old asteroids based game that really ups the ante on trippyness and cool sounds

I should warn you though that it is very flashy, so epilepsy warning is in order

Count this comment as irrelevant if you will, but I think one of the biggest missed opportunities of EGS is mod support. They have this world-class game engine, and they do so little with it. Maybe it is because of Unreal Tournament 4 failing to take off. Maybe they think just hamfisting a bunch of this modding stuff into Fortnite is all they need, but still I feel like the EGS version of the steam workshop is an open goal. Hell, with the money they’re saving from pawning off Bandcamp you can even buy off mod.io to get support for virtually no work at all. Like why hasn’t this happened yet?

I know 5 year old me would have a little trouble sleeping from some of the sounds (example when you pick up an orb) coming from noita, never mind the occasional worm or kummitus jumpscare

I decided to load up tropix again. The game is so much more simplistic than I remember it being when I was like 9

It’s likely gunpowder exploding in the coal pits. Happens a bunch yea