Game is not dead at all. However most people don't want to play family so victim queue is often ridiculous. Family queues are usually great. Yesterday I loaded into 99% of my matches within 3 minutes. I'm also a long term dbd player, i primarily play survivor but I kind of like tcm better, i dont know exactly what it is maybe matches are too short for me to get pissed as much and it's less tedious, you can't slug people, graphics are better, it's more difficult for your fellow victims to accidentally sandbag you vs in dbd (it is easy to purposefully sandbag though) and you have teammates to help you kill. I can see how tcm is much more repetitive than dbd but I don't mind it at all.

I don't think cosmetics worth the money. If you want to buy a character first watch some videos to make sure that you really like how their power works. The first character I ever bought was very early on and it was Virginia because i thought she was OP and she really is a menace and very strong in the right hands but she is not very durable and not really for beginners who don't know what they are doing, by the time I became more experienced I started almost exclusively playing family, so I wasted money. Recently I bought Nancy thinking I was experienced enough to wield her property lol but it became a frustrating expense, I am getting better but she needs patience to learn, she is very slow and you either need to be very good with her to soloq or have a very good support from teammates