Ideally, civ games don't just rely on playing different civs for replayability for me. Civ III had 16 civs at launch, with barely anything to set them apart. You get more uniqueness with the leader picks in VII alone. And yet, I played that game a lot.
I think VII's weakness is more about a lack of sense of place. A big factor is that all terrains feel the same. All cities develop roughly the same. One thing I absolutely love about Civ VI, admittedly enhanced further by mods, is that every tile has a story. "Why is this thing here?" "Well, it all started when I had to make space for the Forbidden Palace. But then I had to move this city so it would stay within six tiles of the new Entertainment Complex location. Oh, by the way, I also wanted a Farm triangle, you see..." The adjacency system was great to anchor a tile's identity in its environment. The Campus can't just be switched with the Industrial Zone. Both were deliberately placed exactly where they are and everything else around them relates to it.
It's already what turned me off Humankind where you just paint cities across the map, rendering terrain meaningless about 50 turns into the game. In Civ VII, we now just farm tundra, grass, and desert alike. We cover up our rivers. All tiles are flat now. And so everything ends up the same. "Why is this thing here and not there?" "Idk, I had to put it *somewhere* and this was one of three tiles with the highest number."