For reference, to play Warcraft 1 multiplayer you joined a chatroom on Battle.net and the chat channel gave everyone a ~~terminal~~ MS-DOS command that you had to copy/paste into the terminal. If anybody had any network more complicated than computer -> modem then it would fail. If anyone failed to connect your game would crash. I was gaming like this at around 10 years old.

Obviously, comparing 2025 Linux to '90s Windows isn't exactly fair... but gamers are not incapable of dealing with complexity.

Sure, don't tell your 8 year old cousin to swap from Windows to Linux. But if you're a smart high school student then you can learn. Like anything, it'll take some getting used to and you'll have to deal with frustrations but knowing how to use Linux and, probably more importantly, how to research and solve problems is well worth the effort.