I think to mitigate some of this is to add more bonus resources by default (I realize there is a game setting for this) and reduce the bonus of the chop. That way everyone can participate in chopping goodness and derive some benefit without also making your empire an empty wasteland. Also, I can chop a resource that I need removed for a strategic district and not feel like I've changed the identity of the city. The fact that there are more bonus resources will be limited in part because the harvest bonus is slightly reduced to go along with the increasing cost of builder charges needed to chop them.
To add in, maybe give all bonus resources a minor adjacency bonus and not just the resources you build mines and quarries on. Why not? It's ridiculous how low adjacency bonuses are in a lot of cases. And maybe give forests a tree unlock at some point in mid-game to provide +1GPT from hunting or maybe an additional bonus to defense for military units. I hesitate to say food because farms are already almost worthless.
As far as how I would modify my play if I didn't use chops.. well chops are extremely useful to push a wonder or an early district while also being able to get back to other priorities like protection. I feel on higher difficulty levels, game balance includes heavy chopping or nothing else would really get built in the first 75 turns except for military, a few builders and settlers, and a couple monuments. On Deity, Wonders would definitely be a huge risk without chopping. Basically pointless to try.
This basically gets me to my thoughts on balancing in general. I really do feel like they need to rebalance to allow for more population in cities. No easy task because it hits on lots of fundamental mechanics.. district requirements, happiness, science, etc. I think that would limit the chopping because now your cities have the population to immediately work more tiles instead of letting them sit vacant for 150 turns which means I chop that tile.
Adding in some extra bonuses for the bonus resources would be great. I do think in the middle or late part of the game you should be able to more or "plant" resources. Like, seriously, what is a farm on a grassland tile actually farming, if not wheat/rice? We should be "planting" cows or sheep on tiles to get little pasture triangles. And if you add an extra bonus for having forests or jungles next to each other as well, that would help too. I'd love if it you had a big grassland space between cities if there was a legit decision of whether to use the land for cows, sheep, corn, wheat, etc... Would love it if there was a real reason to farm things.
And yes, the point about population, I'd love it if they could allow a more exponential growth. We're almost getting to enough housing to fit it in - we just need some more amenities and other balance. There's even a sort of "natural" district procession change to do - instead of having new districts unlock at fixed points (1, 4, 7, 10, etc...) having it at increasing points. So unlock a new district at size 1, 3, 6, 10, 15, 21, etc... It ends up virtually the same at the low numbers, but done this way, if you actually let cities grow to size 25, 30, or even 40, it's not like you're filling the land with districts anyways. You'd need to increase citizen slots (could do them the same way, so instead of just 1 slot per building, the library would be 1 citizen, uni adds 2, and research lab adds 3, so a city could have up to 6 people working in the campus). Yes, the later citizens would be less productive at being "worth" just 2 science or whatever, but the problem now is that they just eat up too many amenities to even think about growing that big.