Punishing players with no wifi

Loaded fine for me without WiFi.

subtle brag is subtle, OP. Well played

I had the opposite problem. After re-installing the game because it wouldn't start, it refused to download the new assets over WiFi (CONNECTION ERROR popup), but worked on 4G.
Once all assets were downloaded the WiFi worked again.

Then it happened again with today's forced restart because it needed to grab more assets.

That's rather an issue of your phone settings, isn't it? I remember there was anywhere the option to not allow big amounts of data downloaded as long as wifi is off, no matter for which app.

Nope. It started with the new client that came out about a week ago.