First three times -- getting to main menu (losing focus)?
Fourth time -- accepting the internet firewall popup -- again a focus issue.
Fifth time -- after finding the tower, setting a route, and hitting the 2nd blue marker (first 10 minutes of gameplay) -- not a focus issue.

I'll try it again in a few months. Really would like to play the game but haven't experience such instability for any other game and play a lot of games! Also note that it takes the game a long time to start up -- there's no visual feedback until like 30 seconds in so it's a rough UX experience.

I have a high end setup in 4K with RTX capability. In order to play certain games with ray tracing a few months ago, I had to update to latest Windows to get access to DX12 support. So perhaps its something to do with that? DX12 hasn't been super stable, but not sure what's going on under the hood with this game. I suspect it's a straight-forward DX11 game, and DX11 has been rock solid. I was already on the the latest available Nvidia drivers. I have not updated yet to the latest major Windows 10 update 1909. I'm pretty sure that's not it, because almost everyone would be crashing.

Windows 10 Pro 64-bit (10.0, Build 18362.778) Version 1903
System Manufacturer: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd.
System Model: MS-7B17
BIOS: 1.60 (type: UEFI)
Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-9900K CPU @ 3.60GHz (16 CPUs), ~3.6GHz
65536MB RAM

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti
Current Mode: 3840 x 2160 (32 bit) (60Hz)
Driver Version: 26.21.14.3200

50% available drive space on 1TB NVMe

So if there is a known issue, please let me know and I'll give it a go again. Thanks!