Most if not all of these have one side that is clearly in the wrong. Real life is more complicated. Conflicts are usually gray vs. grey, with both sides having identifiable faults and justifications. But even then, if you spent all your time seeing the world from the perspective of certain designated protagonists you’ll likely sympathize with them anyway.
I only played Stellaris off and on, but I went years without buying an expansion and always thought the new systems were complete and better than what they replaced when I returned. Breaking current saves is frustrating, so I guess you would need to delay an update if you had one you planned on returning to.
If you didn’t know, you can roll back to older versions of steam games with some work. A few games have a built-in system, but most of the tile you have to manually replace files after redownloading the old versions.