I think I'd like to see like more my own bullets coming off, like I couldn't really tell how often I was firing or who was being hit. Like in your first video, I see a bunch of enemies die, what hit them, how often was it shooting, how many hits did each enemy take. This is the kind of information that as a player I use to plan my moves. Like in vampirine survivor even when the scene gets nuts it's still rarely vague about what is coming out of you to hit your enemies. Also particle effects/sound effects/ (maybe there was sounds for the hits and I missed them) etc all make for more readable impact. But I agree might be easier once I get my feet under me on it!
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I get what you're saying and you're 100% right. As for the reasoning behind why I made the choices:
SFX I ran out of time to implement properly, so I discarded most of it. The issue is that most turrets shoot at a rate of 2/sec, and you can have up to 50 turrets, which would make it just a constant "bleep". As for visually, at first, I had flying bullets, but it was programmatically much easier/faster to add effects to an instant hit, and I had less overhead on calculating bullet pathing (Again, same problem -> instant hits = easier), and it took little to no time to setup without bugs (compared to bullets with special effects).
Now if I let the bullets just fly without pathing, then you start missing shots, which felt like a punishment and wasn't fun. If I speed up the bullets so that they don't miss, they fly so fast that you won't even see them, which would make them equivalent to instant hits.
The cleanest way to convey the info would then be like you mention a particle effect for an on hit, and prototype a bullet with tracking.
For debugging I added logs of the damage done per turret, perhaps I should make it accessible in the ui in some form that it's clear what's doing the most dps.