What these games leave out
Being honest about the limits of the model is more useful than pretending it has none, so here is what none of the fifteen games simulate, and why.
There is no weather system in the real sense. Wind in these games is a single number with a direction that pushes everything the same way. Real wind varies with height, gusts, backs and veers, and has a different idea about what it is doing a hundred feet lower down. The games flatten that into one vector because a player can only hold one picture in their head at a time, and the interesting decision, which is whether to fight the wind or use it, is already there in the flattened version.
There is no ground effect, no compressibility, no flutter and no structural limit. You cannot break an aeroplane here by pulling too hard. The wing either has airflow or it does not, and that is the whole of the failure model. Real aircraft have a long list of ways to go wrong that have nothing to do with the pilot's decisions, and a game built on that list would be a game about maintenance rather than about flying.
There is also no air traffic control, no radio, no paperwork and no other people. Every aeroplane in these games is alone in the sky, which is the one liberty taken that a pilot would find strangest. Tower is the closest the site comes to admitting that other aircraft exist, and it makes them a puzzle rather than a conversation.
What is left after all that removal is the part of flying that is a series of trades. That is the part worth making a game out of, and it is the part these four explainers are about.