Does it really? We seem awfully quick to forget that little detail about the "Peoples Republic of China".

Not at all. I'm actively playing it on Linux under Steam/Proton. Works like a charm. You have to tweak a dll in the virtual system32 though. Its pretty trivial and the instructions are in the proton database. (https://www.protondb.com/app/813780)

The only constraint is that you need a graphics card that supports vulkan AFAIK. In my case a Vega integrated into the Ryzen 2400G CPU.

No performance issues, after the tweak no desync of online games or crashes in the mod downloader either.