I'm having problems getting mods to work.

A friend's got the game on Steam, and that version has a "Mods" button on the main menu (between Settings, and Credits). It's not using Steam Workshop, it's using Mods.io apparently, letting you just browse and install mods from ingame. It seems to be the same kind of system Factorio uses, but we don't get that in the GoG version.

There's that dedicated website that lets you download their mods manually, but the manager that comes with it throws a fit and refuses to work if you don't have Steam installed. Requests for them to support non-Steam installs got smacked down with, "we don't support piracy", which is incredibly rude to all GoG, EGS and whichever other store the game might be on, players. That response was in Feb 2023 and I don't see any change, since I obviously ran into the issue yesterday.

And as for the manual installation and using a shortcut parameter to launch the game with mods enabled, couldn't get that to work either.

Ssssoooo... how?