First things first: Other card games are not inherently more balanced. Pokemon has wild issues with powercreep and set design, and MTG has plenty of complexity creep. Especially in modern times as they march onward to people's wallets alone, it is not a great time to be saying MTG is more balanced.
Next up, as far as the Performapal Performage format went... It was entirely kneejerk. The deck is widely accepted to be the weaker variant between Dracopal and itself, despite the former surviving and thriving even after PePe died. Not to mention, they were strong cards printed into a power vacuum after everything else had been hit. For Christ's sake, Kozmo was a premiere deck. People wanted Kozmo to be nerfed into the ground and, not long after, for Blue-Eyes to get bans because it was the "best deck"... ignoring that these were cases of decks being good in formats where the actual good cards got hit. Not to say the Pal variants weren't good, just that the "Tier 0" nature was due to the vacuum they sat in, not due to their power level being creep.
A lot of the ZeXal and VRAINS era decks were far worse game environments than PePe or Dracopal ever were. People just hate pendulums and have since launch, so it was easy to kneejerk when they were good.
Complexity is a thing in yugioh, but we have (for the most part) hit a peak with it. Unlike other card games that have marched on with complexity creep in recent times. Yugioh has it bad in wording for sure, and that's an issue that's been around for a long time, not anything new. I'd like to codify it more, but it's largely an issue with the rather strict rules that yugioh is built upon, as opposed to looser rules of other card games. This is a major structural issue, but please do not act as if it is only yugioh that has pushed forward with complexity.
You're also making a false equivalency with a game like Chess as a comparison. They are day and night, and there's not much of any point in saying "but does it have the longevity of chess", when Chess is a solved and static game. This is not to call it a bad game by any means, but it is absolutely incomparable.
Saying that it's too luck based to be strategic is also just incorrect. I know you stated it as a joke, but it's... not a joke that needs to keep being brought up. Yes, sometimes you just lose, because one hand was better than the other. But that is not nearly as common as it is implied to be. There's a lot about matchups to learn, not to mention about how other players play if you're going to be regularly participating against them.
To answer why I play yugioh... not even close to just nostalgia. I enjoy the openness of the card game, despite its strict rules, and the ability to solve and go through things. Sure, combos that start with Firewall Defender and use almost all of your ED for one "strong" board aren't good, but they are uniquely Yu-Gi-Oh. And that's not even all that I find fun. I tend towards Midrange, which ygo has in spades, but it has its fair share of control, stun, and even combo or beatdown. The game is more varied and open than it is given credit for at many points. Sure, there are decks I fucking hate playing against (as does anyone else), but that doesn't mean that the game is ruined due to them or any such drivel.