It was a PR mistake, I'd say.

The game could chug at launch depending on your settings, and to be clear, their defaults were fundamentally broken, some of the settings that made performance tank were engaged on ALL the default presets. But even at launch it could be made to be playable on most hardware... at the cost of looking basically the same as CS1. They've since patched some of the biggest offenders and it's now smoother than that, too.

But they came out with a preemptive warning, instead of delaying for a short time and fixing those basics and now it's a meme that the game doesn't work on any hardware, and the extremely debatable "can't even do 30fps on a 4090" thing became widespread as well.

FWIW, it's not rare for sequels to take a long time to replace the previous game under that business model. If you look at all the Sims games they probably overlap quite a bit for a while. I played CS2 for 25 hours and stepped away to start playing some other things. Honestly, the performance bugs annoyed me less than some of the weird design and balance things that were also either broken or counterintuitively designed, although they've fixed a bunch of those, too. But I did enjoy getting my first city to megalopolis status and I'll definitely come back to it.