Forum Discussion
robinbear80 Does the launcher crash when you remove or rename the Sims 3 user folder but before you've added back any of your old content? Please test and let me know.
The launcher crashing when the Downloads tab is clicked is a known issue:
Launcher crashes when I open the downloads tab in Sims 3 | EA Forums - 12167613
There's no fix for it, and the only workaround to install Store content is the one you've found.
I'm not a huge fan of EA support, but for what it's worth, this is an OS issue, not anything on EA's end. It would be unreasonable to expect the company to update Sims 3 just because Apple built in some new feature that doesn't play well with the game. This would be different if Sims 3 were still in development, but the last content patch was in 2014, and since then we've only had a couple compatibility updates, one each for Windows and macOS. Both of those were required to allow the game to start at all.