Just my hot take: if you effectively skipped a game, you may not be in a good position to judge it. Particularly given how much the expansions and patches change. What is written above is really not an accurate depicted of gameplay.
Having a bad experience with a game and not wanting to play it is understandable, particularly if that game was hyped up (and Civ 6 was). That's not a great point of reference though. I played Civ VI when Gathering Storm came out and was underwhelmed even then. I went back to VP for a long time. I only gave Civ VI another chance after New Frontier was released. Now I have over 1000 hours in it. That's significantly less than I have playing Vox Populi, but the game ended up a lot better than I expected it to be based on my initial impressions.
I have to start by saying that what i wrote were legitimate experiences i had playing the game so i feel that is a bit harsh to say they are not an accurate depiction of gameplay. And when i say i am effectively skipping Civ VI i have
only played 277hrs compared to 1,808hrs on Civ V/VP so it's not like i haven't played enough to experience the game.
I do note you mention the game only got good after you got the NFP which i did not purchase as i wanted to see if the game had improved in it's normal form before stumping up another £30 on content which received mostly negative reviews and often seemed gimicky and out of character with the civ series, delving into the realms of fantasy, or where it seemed like legitimate content.e.g. the corporations, was widely reported as very unbalanced and broken with numerous reports of people getting accidental tourism victories for example without even trying or simply OP which do not sound like fun to me even if they do to others. I play Civ for the quasi redoing of world history, if i want myth and fantasy there are plenty of myth and fantasy based 4x style games out there which are frankly much better than Civ VI.
I always played on the largest map (as i have always played all Civ games) and started on lower difficulties but worked my way up to immortal before i gave up as it was becoming formulaic and boring with me using the same basic strategy every game to win which involved the ICS strategy i mentioned with the same 3 core districts in every city...commercial/harbour district, religious district, entertainment/water park district and district of your victory type which you could spam endlessly and not have to worry about amenities apart from occasionally a small hump in the early game if you expanded extremely quickly.
You may wonder why a science district is not included in the core set-up and that is because Civ VI does not punish wide play by raising resource costs with more cities and you get plenty of science from population so for the most part you can just keep ICSing to get more population which means more [than enough] science. I would only tend to build science districts if going for a science win just to get it finished quicker.
All of those experiences were experienced at immortal level as i understand the AI may perform worse at lower levels but i saw very little difference if at all in the AI performance from lower to higher levels, particularly on the military front and i never found the combat in any way challenging or engaging once i worked out the updated mechanics with me only actually fighting wars i generally chose to and that only being because i wanted to spice up the game from being a peace fest or because it was the only way to combat loyalty pressure from AI cities.
The example above where my whole continent DoW'd me was kind of an exception in that it came about through an emergency which they all agreed to and all DoW'd me which was the only time where the AI felt aggressive although it obviously wasn't. I honestly don't remember a DoW against me outside of that instance with all other wars being instigated by me.
Diplomacy in general was a classic missed opportunity and example of most things they got wrong with Civ VI. I liked that they made it so you could actually use diplomacy features to make friends and keep them but it was a one way street going the wrong way in that i found i had to work hard to annoy the AI rather than work hard to keep them friendly.
This reminded me of another couple of basic mods i had to get which was one to show me the AI's gpt so i could effectively make deals without endless trial and error and another one i looked for as i realised i was buying multiple versions of the same luxury all the time as the UI would not tell me i already had them and that same mod also told me what luxuries the AI had as i was wasting so much time asking the AI if they wanted a resource they already had as the UI didn't tell me that simple piece of information.
I found a lot of basic information missing from the UI and a lot of pointless information i never used getting in the way of information that may have been useful but was either hard to find or not easy to navigate to.
I could go on about the issues with Civ VI...
