iirc the developer doesn’t do sales? idk it was never a fiasco, just bad if you like sales I guess.

How is that a fiasco? Per hour played, Factorio is stupendously good value, you pay once and you can play forever.

The absence of sales is a big win for me. It made it a no-brainer purchase for me.

Yep, having sales makes a fair number of people wait until there is a sale. Without sales you're pushed back to a (more) binary decision, do I want the game or not, rather than do I want the game at $X price.

Also with sales you get some portion of people that buy things because they are on sale rather than knowing if they really want the game or not, which can lead to complaints on forums.

There was approximately 1 day where the pricing in some currency was off by 1-2 orders of magnitude.

I believe the conjecture was that it was politically motivated.