The-Magic-Sword
Small Ball Archmage
Neither do I, I'll be honest, I think other factors are more important to 5e's success than whether it holds up under the kind of pressure that I'm discussing.
In terms of what makes 5e special, I would say that it came out at the perfect time, it sanded away a lot of the tactical complexity of the previous two editions of the game, which gave it a reputation for simplicity and streamlined play that I think made players a lot more patient with its fairly dense and often ambiguous rules.
The culture of play it cultivated for itself also prizes roleplaying, sometimes to the deliberate exclusion of mechanical play, so from what I've observed you see some people taking on the point of view that "you're having problems because that's the wrong way to play the game" and almost prefer that the system breaks down because it validates them. Others seem to have a sense that "its always been this way" about those problems and shunt it off into GM responsibility, which I've seen lead to GM burnout-- which is something some GMs who switched discussed not realizing was the system until they did. In some ways I think the 'rule of cool' culture we've seen develop is a movement that strives to deal with 5e's problems by limiting the system's influence over the game, its goal is essentially to Make System Matter Less.
One thing that makes the game special, in my eyes, is that since so much of its player base is new a lot of the people who play it don't have a point of comparison for it. In fact for some of them, if it started annoying them they'd probably decide they must not like tabletop games after all, I've met a few people like that. Because everyone is playing it, and its much easier to find players for it than anything else (if the person being frustrated is even open to the idea themselves), the idea of hacking it into shape becomes more appealing, which creates a cycle where everyone is still playing it, even after experiencing problems with it.
This functions to make it a common language between what is unquestionably most TTRPG players-- more or less everyone can talk about Eldritch Blast, or spells to summon a bunch of dinosaurs, because they're all playing with those common rule components to a deeper extent than another edition of the same game even could. This creates another source of investment in the dominant 5e TTRPG culture-- if you exit it, even to something like Pathfinder, you lose a lot of that common ground and culture. This is created by 5e being able to introduce a bunch of players into its sort of walled garden environment, where the walls are made of 5e as a common culture and framework.
I felt that loss when I left the 5e space, as I love the Pathfinder community we have, but its much smaller, and I have less in common with most TTRPG players I come across.
