Steam deck works for me but the performance is bad. Playing a small city on low graphics runs fine. But eventually the simulation speed will get too slow. Gamepad controls work surprising decent though.

While debatable, It's often cheaper to pay someone to host than to do it yourself. Imagine a 1 sysadmin small devshop that doesn't want to pay for 24/7 on call support but does have devs working in different time zones. Or a big enterprise that needs support (perhaps someone to blame). Joke about corporate culture if you want, but often it's less stressful to blame a vendor than an employee or the internal culture. It may take 10 minutes to set up. Hours a month to maintain. Weeks to get permission to install it. Time to hire support sysadmin staff. Time to explain why kubernetes/simple vm/heroku/shiny new thing would make hosting it easier.

Why not github? Perhaps the person or org just likes open source. Distrusts Microsoft. Wants the option to self host as a bail out strategy. Or just dislikes github. Competition is great.

This argument applies to most open source apps with hosting options. I'm a fan of this model.

That description of the visuals is spot on. It's hard to describe because when you look at one asset, it looks great. But most of the time the overall feel is a downgrade. I'm playing on Geforce Now, so it's not on a low end device. The trees can model well, except when they are glitchy weird paint smudges rapidly shifting LOD for no apparent reason. Some roads look great while others seem lower resolution than SimCity 2000. CS 1 had a more cartoonly look but overall IMO can easily look overall better especially on lower end devices. The cartoon or pixelated style is easier to pull off with weaker hardware. Regardless I wish CO luck. Add bikes and make the LOD not bonkers and it will be a great game.

For me it's easily paying subway fare, seeing notifications, leaving my phone home for a quick errand (but could make a call if absolutely necessary). I have a small child, so having hands free abilities is great. If I could degoogle it and run only open source linux/android, I would. But nfc payments will never work with such a thing even if the software existed.