That's actually a fair point. Right now there are no floors on requirements. What Civ6 (or more likely Civ7 since it would be a radical design shift) would be city requirements on buildings (which I believe previous civ games have had). You can build an educational district in a generic city, but you can't build a library until you have 3 pops, you can't build a university until 10, a research center until 15, etc. Then you balance those buildings around the idea that you want players to want them, so you make it worth it. Then you balance the game around making taller cities harder to keep happy.
So wide play gives you piles of low-maintenance cities with very little in the way of happiness requirements because they are small and easy to manage, but they're not terribly powerful outputs either because you can't build the multiplier buildings. So you can make a linear amount of

roduction: and

, but you're not dealing with disease and unhappy pops.
Tall play gives you multiplier buildings with significantly higher per-pop

roduction: and

output, but you've got major issues keeping them fed, happy, and entertained.
I would play the hell out of that Civ7.
Edit: Apparently "production" with colons around it isn't the way to make it display hammers, but I'm not changing it because that's funny.