So after the nightmare that was Chimera Squad, Firaxis have managed to anger their loyal player base yet again. They pushed an update out for XCOM2, that introduced a new unified launcher for XCOM2 / Chimera Squad and for whatever reason Civilization VI.
Besides the fact that this makes zero sense, when you are already launching the game from steam, the worse part is that the new launcher seems to break all mods. When launching the game using the new launcher none of the mods load. Regardless of them being installed and enabled. Some people reported they can't even launch the game, while others "only" lost save games, and custom characters from the character pool, due to the mods not loading properly or at all.
So far I've seen no official acknowledgement of the issue. The steam discussions are loaded with threads people complaining that they can't use mods.
Of course the shills are already out white knighting saying that Firaxis is not obligated to support mods. True, they aren't obligated, if their goal is to make people stop playing the game.
So far the only confirmed workaround is using the community developed Alternative Mod Launcher, or AML.
After the clear political agenda in Chimera Squad, I can't entirely rule out that this is not a deliberate attack to weed out undesirable mods. You know, mods that aren't woke approved, mods that make female characters look better, etc.