I have the Pirates and Nobles expansion and it works.
Edit: Also everything is and was already installed in the EA app. The base game and the expansion are the digital version. I got rid of all my game's physical disks years ago.
I also was experiencing a lot of crashes using the 1 cpu option setting. After clicking, (selecting) the 3 cpu instead of the 1 cpu the crashes are a lot less but on long play sessions it'll still crash.
I also noticed sims getting stuck underground with the testing cheats enabled even though I never used moveobjects, so I had to turn that cheat setting back to zero in the ini folder.