I’ve never called Paradox’s DLC policy stupid. It’s very smart and Paradox are a very, very successful game studio. I don’t believe I’ve ever called any of the main DLCs for Stellaris crap, I thought all three were ok but didn’t fundamentally change the issues I had with the base game. I may have posted 18 months ago about being unhappy that they were selling their first DLC so soon after launch when the base game was in an (IMO) shoddy state though!
In the EU4 thread, my question around DLC was to Johan in 2013 and it related to how previously Paradox had differentiated between DLC (fluff) and Expansions (added game changes beyond art/music), but that in the first few EU4 minor DLCs they included content that would have only been in Expansions in EU3/CK2.
You can view for yourself here: https://forum.quartertothree.com/search?q=dlc%20user%3Akedaha
I’ve liked some of the EU4 DLC and not found others to be worth the money, but I’ve never had any sort of overwhelming issue with EU4 DLC beyond things like adding Development to the base game but requiring DLC to interact with it (THANKS COMMON SENSE). I was somewhat unhappy with EU4 initially because I didn’t feel like the ideas system was as good as my beloved sliders from previous games, but that was it!