https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=53057
--- Comment #9 from Morgan Wesström winehq@pp.dyndns.biz --- (In reply to Rafał Mużyło from comment #7)
... Let's just hope this won't end up a case of the bug being in vanilla effectively forever and only actual change was a staging patch being turned ineffective.
I'm afraid it actually looks that way. I've now reached 6.22 (also tested stable 6.0.2) and I can't make the console key work in any vanilla version. After turning to Google I found several references from other Linux/Wine users with the same problem in various games which utilize the same console key mechanics. The workaround was to switch to US keyboard layout. I tried it and all the wine versions, that I had still left on my system, suddenly had a working console with the tilde key.
So to summarize, it seems this mechanics only works with US keyboard layout on wine-vanilla. It works with US and Swedish keyboard layouts (and presumably others too) in wine-staging up to and including version 7.7. From 7.8 onwards, the bahaviour is non-functional and identical to wine-vanilla. Needless to say, when the game is run on native Windows, keyboard layout doesn't matter. The console key always works.
After this realization I did indeed look at the staging commits but didn't find the particular one you linked. I thank you for that.
So it does look that this was indeed functionality added by the staging patchset and my bug report should probably be considered invalid and instead be labeled a missing feature request. For now I can live with the workaround and switch to US keyboard layout when needed. I will have a look at the patch you linked and as long as it doesn't need tons of maintenance, I can add it as a local patch when I compile wine.