To this day I miss Civ II's Civilopedia, and the full entries that came up when researching a tech. The move to quotes alone was a mistake however good the quotes in my view (though Civ IV at least retained a lot of background information in the associated tech pages) - it's not something I ever liked about Alpha Centauri, the apparent inspiration for that approach, though in that case mostly because there was no description of the techs beyond the quote.
Civ VI's introduction is excruciating, especially the generic starting 'beasts of the Stone Age' rubbish before the badly-written leader intros that say far less about the leader or the civ than Civ V's managed in equivalent space. While the quotes are rather unfairly maligned (there remain many from classical figures - the American comedians appear to be in the minority - and the focus on the terrible, terrible Kilamanjaro piece glosses over the more general advance of having Natural Wonder quotes at all, most of them with the appropriate tone and an appropriate author), there's a higher density of duds than there ought to be. Some of the quotes in past Civ games were pretty uninspired ('it's the wheel. Let's have some text that mentions a wheel' - "Put your shoulder to the wheel" in Civ IV is no better than Civ VI's effort, Nimoy or no Nimoy, and at least the Civ VI version better reflects the idea of inventing the thing. Civ V alone had a good quote even if it was one that had nothing to do with the concept of inventing the wheel) and sometimes misplaced ("Rock Island Line" is not a bad thing to quote, it's just a bad thing to quote when researching Railroad in a Civ game), but few have been actively bad in the way Civ VI's worst are. Okay, Alpha Centauri had some dreadful crap, but going back to it I found there's less than I remembered - my perception was skewed, as that of Civ VI's detractors are by the Kilamanjaro quote, by one or two spectacularly bad pieces.