I played over two hundred hours of the steam version on Proton 8

Unless something has changed, it plays fine through Steam with proton.

ProtonDB confirms: https://www.protondb.com/app/233860

I managed to, through Lutris, with an old cracked version. Although I had to use winetricks to install a bunch of extensions.

I did, years ago, it worked perfectly. This was when DX9 was an option for it though, but given since then dxvk / etc. came out the DX11 renderer should not be an issue. In fact I’d be surprised if the game didn’t run as-is without any tweaks.

I suggest using the gog version. appdb suggests installing vcrun2010 might be needed but again, test beforehand.