There are unfortunately few games of decent caliber in the genre, and most are combat flight sims but here are my experiences:
>il-2 1946
Best combat oriented flight sim in existence once the formerly CUP (now BAT) mod is installed. With vanilla content included, there are several hundred aircraft available with varying quality flight models/visual models. 90% of visual models work and are accurate. Mods enable truly dynamic campaigns but engine limitations make good fps, even on high power modern machines, difficult.
>il-2 Battle of Britain
broke ass shit compared to the above, but saw some definite improvements in flight models and overall graphics. Extremely little diversity in terms of content, but when mods are installed, including a community mod approved by the devs themselves, it's not a bad game. Still has a stable multiplayer community unlike the above.
>il-2 Battle of Stalingrad
pay to play, play to win junk. Less content than either of the aforementioned, but utilities a pay per flight model system like DCS with about 10% of the FM accuracy or quality of DCS.
>War Thunder
extremely mixed feelings on this one. Obviously everything is constantly wrong with the game, it's free to play- pay to win garbage developed by a bunch of drunk slavkikes. There is obvious pro-soviet, anti-german historical revisionism and yet occasionally there is the potential for fun. Shitposting will get you permabanned from chat but short of btfo the devs on the forums, they won't delete your account. There is probably more content in War Thunder than any other sim; yet with current game modes and tiers, its hopelessly repetitive. That said, there is something extremely satisfying about loading up a sim combined arms match in a FW90 and killing anything that flys with impunity because the playerbase is 90% retards that can't into dogfighting.
>DCS
only decent sim for modern military aircraft. It easily exceeds any Arma in terms of complexity and realism but hides most of it's content behind expensive paywalls. Given the depth, this is the only one on the list which has content useful for irl pilots. It's also the only sim I have played that played well with VR, although immersion isn't immersion if it makes you play worse, which the VR certainly did.
>Microshit Combat Flight Sim 3
Played a decade ago, and it's extremely dated compared to others listed, but at the time, it was the absolute best you could get, had tons of content, multiplayer, mods ect. Probably not a bad idea for those with machines so potato they can't play IL-2.
If you want an actual flight sim for general aviation whatever the modern Xplanes is the only game available to the public that the FAA allows irl pilots to log sim hours in.