Anyone else having issues with Apex Legends the last few weeks?

Apex has been running smooth as butter (well, as smooth as apex can run :) ) for the last year or so on my PopOS machine. I haven't had to log into windows to game in about 18 months.

I noticed a few months ago that I would get errors / crashes, seeimingly randomly where 'pak' files wouldn't load. I'd get a wine-looking pop up with the message. I could fix it by Validating Game Files. Inevitably it would find corrupt or invalid files and redownload them and it would work again.

Something happened about ~4 weeks ago where it became much more frequent to the point where its now unplayable on PopOS.

I've done everything I can think of:

• completely removed steam and all my games from my system and retried with the deb package in the store. (no luck)

• completely removed that and my games and tried with the flatpak (same issues)

• I even, thinking my ssd might be failing, bought a new one, cloned my stuff over to that, etc (no luck, same issues).

• I just uninstalled the game again and am trying to redownload as I am typing this and it gets to the end, fails (corrupt update files), then puts me in a loop of validating, downloading, pausing download, etc.

All of my other games seem to work fine and update fine.

Apex works on my steamdeck. Apex works fine on this same machine on Windows 10.

I used inotify-tools to see if something was editing the files in between gaming sessions when it worked and when it didn't and nothing seems to be accessing let alone updating/writing to those files. So the corruption or whatever happens during use.

I have tried Proton experimental and literally every version back until it wouldn't even make sense to run. I tried the last 5 or so ProtonGE versions as well.

The thing is: Is this a Pop issue? Is it an Apex issues? Is it a proton issue? Is it a steam issue?

I don't even know where to post this 'issue' too.

For what its worth, I am happy to try and run this down and provide whatever logs may help. I could learn some auditd!

HALP!

<in the mean time I am going to tuck my tail and boot back into Windows so I can game for a bit>