It's alot more convenient then wine as it's built into steam. You could get a lot of games working on wine before but setup could be a bit of a pain. With Proton you just install and play on steam like you would with a native Linux game.
Generally for the Civ games the new one doesn't become overly popular till a few expansions are released. It was the same when Civ V came out, a lot of people were saying Civ IV was better. Civ VI is a good game I think most people will switch eventually, just takes some time.
It might be worth mentioning that Digital Ocean has added features recently that now put it more on the level GCE, AWS, Azure. It is still pretty basic but has added firewalls and object storage and it is pretty good prices. It would of course depend on your needs though.