Alright, I've gotten a little further, but still no cigar.
I used LXC to make a 32-bit ubuntu container (https://wiki.winehq.org/Building_Biarch_Wine_On_Ubuntu#Install_LXC) so I could successfully download all dependencies for building the special 32-bit version of wine and I applied the ffxi patch. It worked perfectly fine! I was getting sound in the installer and received options within the configuration....but unfortunately the exact same graphics bug remains. So it appears that the patch didn't fix it. Now, I was using the secondary fix that you had posted in your guide https://bugs.winehq.org/attachment.cgi?id=62646&action=diff&context=patch&collapsed=&headers=1&format=raw, the one you have stated in your main example did not build correctly..

So i'm not sure what else to say. I might try out an older version of wine. Do they have a page where I can download archived versions of wine?

Also, PlayOnLinux doesn't work well with Kubuntu 18.04 for some reason.. All versions i've tried, none of the windows display properly and they all appear as extremely tiny windows, impossible to interact with.

Well, it seems like I was complicating it too much.. Just switched from the wine-devel package on Ubuntu to wine-stable and now everything works.. No need for any of the extreme changes. Seems to be working just fine now!

Welcome! Sorry, I was not so clear about the rolling release thing. yes, for future readers, this is only on the bleeding edge stuff. As for the patch not working fine, the WINE developers could break things with future releases.

I will take a look to see if the patch is still legit or not or if it needs updating. They already broke it once, hence the 2nd patch. Guess they could've broken it again.