IMHO the Greek question is still "if separate them into Athens, Sparta, Ionia, etc. then each looks too small and don't have a good city list (esp. Athens), but if group them together then it will result in a blob and left no accurate place for Alexander".
Basically: We always say 4x games cannot handle nomadic people well, but they cannot handle City-States well either; and City-States are not that hard to handle (CS civs don't require the devs to write a new set of game mechanism, it is more of a problem of how to alter the existing mechanism in a fun way).
Exactly. The two big problems that (probably) Civ VII has to address are Nomadic/Pastoral Civs that had great influence on their neighbors in all directions, like the Scythians, Sarmatians, Huns, Mongols, etc, and the City State Civs like Greece, which, in that specific case, had simply enormous influence culturally and scientifically, but was never a political 'state' unless conquered by someone else (Cue Alexander, Rome, Ottomans, etc)
There are two examples of potential solutions to the City State Problem, at least.
1. There was an Olmec Modded Civ in Civ V which addressed the City State problem head on. It had a completely Spanish city list, which drove me crazy every time I saw it, but it did reflect some of the City State 'problem'. Every city founded after the first one added to the Science, Culture, etc points for your Civ without requiring any maintenance on your part, but you could not build anything in those cities. IF attacked, all the cities in the Civ defended (not quite realistic, that) but you had no control over how much the other cities might add to the defence, what units they might build, etc, unless you 'assimilated' them, in which case they became a 'normal' city in your budding Empire but you lost all the automatic Culture, Science, etc. from them.
2. Also in Civ V, there was an Iroquois Mod Civ in which whenever you founded a city, including the first one, you picked which 'tribe' it belonged to: Seneca, Mohawk, Cayuga, Onandaga, Oneida, (I don't remember if they included the Tuscarora late-joiners or not) - and each tribe had a different set of Bonuses for the city, based on Production, Military, Science, Food, etc.
These two different approaches to the City State Problem IMHO have potential, if combined and massaged, to provide a working mechanism for such civilizations.