Comment by noirbot

That's not how Wine or Proton works in my experience. As OP said, Steam and Lutris both have tooling to easily set up Wine prefixes per-game, including specifying specific versions, including custom compilations like GloriousEggroll's builds. In general, you can flip between versions comfortably and easily, often without having to do anything more than changing a value in a GUI.

I could see it being an issue if you were managing your Wine prefixes by hand, but that's like deciding to install your OS dependencies without apt or dnf and then complaining that Linux has bad packages because you chose not to use a package manager.

I literally play multiple online games in Wine/Proton on a daily basis, including Path of Exile, FF14, WoW, and Payday 2. The only one I've had major issues outside of general performance with is FF14 and that's because it integrates closely with Steam and their launcher uses a super outdated version of .NET that Wine hasn't worked out how to emulate. It's been broken for years, and is a known and documented issue with Wine.