I've gotten a lot of enjoyment out of Crusader Kings II.

I think there's a kneejerk reaction against paradox g@m3rs in general because the online HOI and EU are so infested with fash, and a lot of the people vocal online CKII fandom isn't great there's the eastern european/generally islamophobic fash "I WANT TO KKKILLLLLL ALL THE MUSLIMS DESU VULT CRUSADE NOW" people, the "haha hi reddit so i cheated on my mother-wife with my sister-daughter-aunt and our first child was an inbred r-slur but our second child was a genius how do i kill my own kid" epic THE ARISTOCRATS g@m3r bois, and more than a few unironic misogynists or monarchists who like the world the game portrays. Those people do exist, but from my experience finding and chatting to other CKII players out in the real world they're a tiny minority (<20% combined) of the overall playerbase and while the game does let you do those things, from my 1000 odd hours of playing it I've found it's not at all what it guides you towards.

Crusader Kings II first and foremost a game about emergent storytelling, it populates the world with a cast of thousands of characters just detailed enough to feel real, gives you (and them!) an incredibly complex toolbox to interact with them and then tells you to go nuts and have fun. There isn't a set victory condition. There are soft loss conditions, if all of your family dies the game will kick you out, but you can reload the save and continue playing as any other character in that world if you're attached, and soft victory conditions (surviving until the end, steam achievements, dynasty prestige, conquering THE WHOLE MAP as quickly as possible) but the game never really pushes you towards any of them and most people tend to make their own game out of it. At its heart Crusader Kings II is a story generator and if you talk to most CKII players what they'll want to tell you about isn't the fucked up shit the game let them do or how they killed ALL THE MUSLIMS, they'll want to tell you about the story of their last game, how the characters in the game translated to people in their mind, and what those people did and the world did to those people.

Crusader Kings 2 is a game that does address sexism, homophobia, religious and cultural persecution, feudal exploitation and a lot of other ills of the time period it's set in, but it doesn't portray them in any way positively. Mechanically, misogyny is more often than not an obstacle that needs to be overcame than anything else. The only mechanical disadvantages female characters face are social ones, they are born with and acquire skills and traits and attributes in exactly the same way as male characters and to a mechanically minded player that's constantly chafing, "yeah I could appoint this 14 stewardship man to collect taxes but that lady has 21 stewardship and is midas touched", "sick my daughters a genius, how can I fuck with my succession to make her the heir" are extremely common gameplay experiences. One of the most powerful lines of technology and legal reforms to pursue are "tolerance" and "status of women" because they double the pool of characters available to do anything you may want to do might want them to do and cultures or religious groups that have that from the start have are far more powerful as a result. I've never known a game that hammers home "diversity is strength" as a learned realisation so powerfully & consistently as Crusader Kings. And, even if you don't go seeking it out, sooner or later, under most of the "default" (the ones included at launch) succession laws the game will put you in the role of a, usually young woman inheriting the throne after a plague or a war or just because your parent only had one child and in my experience from most (especially newer) CKII players that story, the story of their first female ruler who took the throne at 14, lived till 80 and became a certified badass, is one of the very first they want to tell you.

Religious and cultural conflict does play a part in the game, nobles have by default (traits, techs, and some religions and cultures can increase or (more commonly) decrease it) -20?ish "foreigner" opinion debuff (opinion can range from -100 to +100 and is, combined with traits, the prime indicator to how an AI is going to respond to actions you take towards them and how they choose to act towards you) towards characters of different culture groups and another -20 on top of that towards rulers of different culture groups, but, as CKII does an excellent job of demonstrating, everyone is equally people, those people from different cultures act according to the same motivations and for the same reasons as people of your culture and while the "foreigner" debuff makes them a little more negatively disposed to you, it's not nearly as much as towards characters you actually have a reason to dislike or conflict with closer to home and more often than not that "foreigner" debuff is again something that you're trying to overcome and build a barrier across because the mongolian Khan's daughter has good traits and you DESPERATELY want a non-aggression pact with the horde rather than anything you ever want to play into.

Crusader Kings 2 takes its name from wars of religion but for that, it's remarkable how good a job it does of showing that the crusades were barely about religion at all. When rulers go to war, it's almost always for fear, money, power, glory, family or some combination of the 4. You need a "casus belli" to declare a war that determines the nominal reason for the fighting, how far you have to go to finish the war and what will change hands at the end of it, but in the eyes of most players (and the AI) that's almost always just an excuse. There are genuine "zealots" (it's a trait) who really will go to war for religious purposes, but they're at most 10% of the game's population, and they're the only ones who will even factor religion into their decision making (aside, of course from a -10 or -20 opinion penalty about the other character being the wrong religion). How religion does factor into consideration in war decision making is that A) a war against rulers of different religions is always available there need be no other casus belli, so opportunity and fear (getting them before they're big enough to get me!) are factors, and the clergy, who can have their own power and draw their power from religious peasants, will almost always be advocating for religious wars because they directly expand their wealth and power.

CKII is a wonderfully materialist game, the three reasons characters do anything are their relationships with others, their own traits, and power, and while the first two vary greatly from character to character the third remains constant and so is the deepest force shaping the world. Similarly, the class relations between rulers, vassals, merchants, kings and peasants are wonderfully and materially portrayed. Nobles (and the player) don't really give a shit about the land or people they're ruling and by focusing on the people (feudal lords and their families) rather than nations CKII does a really good job of portraying that. Lands and peasants ruled are a means of gaining wealth and power and that's pretty much it. Which lands and peasants are being ruled is almost irrelevant compared to how many and how wealthy they are. English counts will happily jump to being Italian dukes with glee at a moments notice, leaving behind their old people, cultures and systems at a moments notice for a taste of a little more power and one of the game's biggest learning experiences is when you player (often accidentally) inherit a much larger realm halfway across the world and have to adapt to it. Nationalist and bootlicking notions of rulers loving or protecting or being loyal to the land are constantly challenged and quickly dispelled by gameplay experiences. As the player taking the role of a ruler you very quickly realise the only reason you're protecting anything is because its YOURS and fuck anyone trying to take it to you and in doing so and trying to take more land and power off other nobles, you're continuously killing peasants by the hundreds and thousands for wars started purely for your (not their, the game does a very good job of showing this) empowerment or pettiness and destroying the lands (war's bad for everyone) just so you can own them. Cultures and religions have some effect but nations and empires are entirely arbitrary and serve only as a sort of gameboard for struggles between nobles. And nobles have class solidarity. Peasant rebellions happen frequently and any noble will help put down another's peasant rebellion, even if they're at war, because if the peasants win that's not good for anyone, one of the few things that can turn most nobles against a character is if you're being unecesarily cruel to the peasants in a way that can inspire rebellion. Merchants have solidarity with each other (when they're not fighting each other for trade posts) and so do (radicalised peasants). Peasant rebels will never fight each other and will often support each other even if one group is radical christian rebels and another is radical islamic rebels if they've gotten to the point where they've taken up arms against you they know who their true enemy is.