I've not installed or played the game, yet. I've been holding off since hearing about the bug two years ago. I was more worried about being stuck with a game that would be left with a fairly major bug, that may never be fixed.

If you start playing, you'll come across skillbooks (not spellbooks, as I had miswritten) fairly quickly, possibly in the first shop or even before that. Their tooltips should indicate their level --- at the beginning of the game, all will be "Novice".

See attached image showing an "Adept" skillbook.

Hmm, I dunno, I think settings and character design never being saved seems worse to me than avoidable crashes haha. I just don't know why companies can't just take like an hour (I'd imagine) to fix it.

When The Past Was Around can not be played further than the end of chapter 2 if Galaxy is not available. The freeze at the end of this chapter can not be avoided in any way, making Galaxy a hard requirement for playing this single-player game.

The devs ( Mojiken Studio) told me that they « are currently investigating the issue » 3 months ago but I got no news since then, and have not seen any update to the DRM-free installers.

Thanks, added to OP.

You can avoid that by using galaxy :)
They could have done it like Kojima Productions did with Death Stranding.
When it is started through EGS, the user gets an ID and has online functionality.
When launched directly without the launcher, a default ID is used, no online functionality is provided (and therefore no shared roads or ziplines or packages from other players to pick up). Also because of the latter the savegames are not interchangeable, but that's a minor setback.