So they fixed the Steam version but not the GOG version? Are they really that different? Shouldn't the base game be the same?

The Steam version has a "beta patch" 1.83 that users can opt into, and it's different from the GOG 1.83. The Steam 1.83 doesn't have the weapon sound bug, but supposedly has other issues which is why it hasn't been distributed on GOG yet.

It's a perplexing situation, but we really don't have many insights into what's going on other than it's taking way longer than it should.

Yeah, that's pretty ridiculous that over 6 months have elapsed and they still haven't fixed the problem. :-/

I'm going to say, this is solved. Version 1.84 onward has fixed this bug and is no longer needs to be active. any mod can close this.

What did you do to get 1.84 to work? Several people, myself included, have observed that version 1.84 and onward stall and ultimately crash at startup. Stardock has never responded to the problem reports, so we seem to be on our own.

do you have any mods? Mine ran fine without any mods

No mods here. For me, it crashes at startup (before reaching the main menu) even when installed on a system that has never had any GOG or Stardock software installed previously. Another user reported that it crashed if he did not disable his firewall, but ran fine with the firewall disabled.