I've tried playing this game via GameNative on an AYN Thor myself because I thought a handheld would be perfect for this kind of game. I'm on the steam version instead of Epic, but I can confirm that there's a monsterous load time when playing the PC version through GameNative. Subsequent launches were faster, especially after I lowered a setting in the menus regarding how it loads data from disk.

But even then, I had a lot of broken textures and models and semi frequent crashes too. I really recommend playing on traditional hardware for the time being.

GameNative has been actual witchcraft for a bunch of games, I'm playing Mina that way myself right now. But yeah for whatever reason, Cassette Beasts isn't playing nice with it yet.

I'm not sure what the reason for this theoretical is when it's already documented that self-hosted instances have full free access to the paid perks.

It's become pretty clear since all of this kicked off that none of the Discord-replacement hopefuls have the infrastructure to accept even the smallest fraction of users fleeing Discord. Paying for some nice-to-have features when using the official instance is at least a plan towards paying for that infrastructure.

Speaking on a more broad level, I find it more suspicious when services are free these days with no path to self-sufficient monetization. We've seen enough of those fall to venture capital influence at this point.

You might see if GoToSocial suits your needs.