I have been trying Work ethic, tithe and some other since this came out as I have been disappointed on how useless religion was and kinda still is in Civ 6 vs 4 and 5. There are 3 big issues with religion systems in the game:
1. The inconsistency of starting biases with religious civs
2. The lack of good faith generators.
3. Warmonger diplo penalties
They are intertwined, as aside from the usual 2 you have no real consistent way of producing enough faith for you to be competitive (emperor and above), therefore you compensate with pantheons and buildings, problem is that the usefulness of some off the buildings (pagoda with 1 diplo) doesn't generate enough faith to compete with real religious behemoths, rendering bonuses to useless for most of the game (not early but it doesn't offset the initial cost). On the other hand, the inconsistency of starting biases with certain civs makes the initial pantheons useless as well as civ benefits. In one game you could exploit work ethic with Arabia, but for that you have to reroll 5 times due to the limited amount of faith generations early game.
Since some civs have no real way of generating faith in a more or less safe manner, they are discouraged of doing so, and as a consequence their fall from grace cannot be mitigated with religion like it was before. In 4 you mitigated your crappy science with religion (or compensate for early expansion) and in 5 it was almost a game changer for culture and economy.
I think that the problem with 6 can be fixed by making faith generation pantheons or ruling out the silly notion of 1 religious building per dominant religion and instead letting other buildings to be produced at the same time, as that could add the complexity it deserves. Or maybe getting rid of religious victory maybe.
There are multiple ways of fixing this, but the general idea I want to share with everyone is that religions is one if not the aspect of the game that is the most affected by rng than anything else, and this being a game on which its meta makes human agency matter less as context and neighbors.
The warmonger diplo penalties is plain childish. It came as a reaction of some smart ass people winning diplomatically by killing the opposition. The problem with this is that it confuses diplo victory with a international voice over global issues through out the ages. Historically even if you were as cruel as the mongols, you still had a voice (and even more important) than the rest of the nations and it did matter more because of the power they held. If they wanted to penalize someone for conquering they should have had separated those two things as you cannot even protect yourself through out the game with the constant bs the ai proposes. This has to do with religion because in older simpler civs religion served as a mitigation, compensation or even enhancing your civ, whereas here it does not.
In conclusion, religion updates are good but not enough, and a Georgia is still consistently useless even after these patches. </3