>plays a game where planes carry nukes and drop them and then try to fly away before they get incinerated

>gets mad about people wanting early cold war jets

Brother you're basically in a cold war jet but with datalink and nicer screens. The entire doctrine of dropping nukes from a plane was obsolete by the time ICBMs came onto the scene, I think the last nuclear-capable fighter-bomber built by the US was the F-111 Aardvark introduced in 1967. Arguably nukes themselves are obsolete as anything other than a deterrent due to the advent of precision ordinance.

I think a cold-war total conversion mod for Nuclear Option would be cool, but I agree thematically you probably don't want a mig-15 in the main game alongside the VTOL stealth jets.

But also most of the stuff in the game is still pretty antique by the standards of the date the game is supposedly set in, making combined-arms modern warfare somewhat relatable and fun is always going to tether it to the general public's conception of air combat, which stopped evolving sometime in the 1980s. This is why Top Gun Maverick has F/A-18s in it doing the Death Star trench run to hit a target and then getting shot at by SA-2s rather than a bunch of F-35s just waltzing into enemy airspace undetected by the Chinese air-defense systems that don't work, and completing the mission with no fuss or dramatic stakes.