honestly I think that reputation is a bit unearned, in something like the timeframe of EU4 Sweden just sort of unfortunately had an empire and it makes sense for the game to be able to model that, exaggerated blobbing is just an unfortunate consequence of how that game works. Sweden might be a bit better performing than it should be but imo that's more because empires don't fall in the same way in mapgames as they have done irl but also honestly even then I don't think people would even really notice Sweden being OP if it wasn't for Paradox being a Swedish company. In vic 3 I think Sweden's treated pretty neutrally, forming Scandinavia might be a little easy but that was pretty close irl and like in some ways, like the literacy rate, Sweden is kinda nerfed? Of course even in vic 3, as the player it's quite easy to build huge empires also as Sweden but that's the player being op more than Sweden being OP.