So haven't played new Catherine yet (and she will be a culture powerhouse), but my first impressions is this release boosts the culture game (both generation of culture and winning cultural games) in pretty severe ways.
First, secret societies (obviously optional) - Secret societies are pretty fantastic for early game in general, as you can get very earlier Pingala + culture and/or science boost. Political Philosophy by turn 40 seems like the norm, rather than a crazy exception now. Beyond that, Void Singers are great for culture. I've been making their monument replacement first build in new cities - +2 culture is nice, but it's the great work slot that is super valuable for culture wins. Now you have a place to put the extra books, art, and music you inevitably generate. You can move books around to expand borders in newer cities faster. Plus the +4 faith generates extra +0.8 science and culture after medieval era. That's not trivial across 10 cities. And the faith itself solves the problem of having no religion - build those naturalists or rock bands later even when you have no religion and aren't playing a civ that generates faith organically (Kupe or Mansa). Extra great work slot combined with Eleanor should be fun. The Industrial age void singer ability to reduce loyalty and generate more religious works seems lovely, but my culture games barely make it into industrial age, so I'm not sure how useful they are (except in a long game - say deity with opponents that are also going for culture so you 500 tourists to win, rather than 200).
Second, Bull Moose Teddy is great, even if you don't try to focus on appeal and national parks. Just the occasional +2 culture/science is pretty great early. You shouldn't really make it to film studios for them to make much of a difference, but the appeal stuff alone is a fairly big boost, unless you are just lacking mountains on your map.
Third, Ethiopia is now my favorite vanilla culture civ. Between void singers monument and rock-hewn churches, you can generate a lot of faith without religion. And 35% of that faith will translate into culture and science. Ethiopia can win culture victories without building a single campus, if they want to. Oh, and faith buying arch museums and archs. Ay, yi, yi. It's boring, but Ethiopia is now the simplest civ to play for cultural victory if you understand classical age golden era monumentality expansion as you can just build void singer monument, theater district, ampitheater and faith buy arch museum and archeologist in new cities and basically ignore everything else.
What I like about it though is that even if you don’t get any initially , you can still build up the appeal and benefit. It encourages a slightly different play style, or you can be lucky and have a really great opening salvo.
Which is also what I like about Peach Cathy, I won my last game with four theatre squares, and about 120 tourism per turn. I had four production heavy cities running the project solely and they we generating a combined total of 1600 culture and tourism every 10-20 turns, while the rest of my cities were as normal (science, military etc).
It opens up a completely different way of playing the culture game that no other Civ can replicate until Rock Bands, and that’s exactly what I love in an ability.
And yeah, I have to do this. There are always periods in my culture games where there's some spare hammers in several cities.
