I think you bring up a valid point, and it just goes to show that more is not necessarily better.
I won't deny that a lot of the complaints brought forward on this community leave Firaxis in a damn-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't situation. People complained about no religious victory in Civ5. Then they add a religious victory in Civ6, and now people complain about religious unit spam and it being tedious. People complained about the World Congress forcing you into some weird decision for eternity in Civ5. Then they add proposals in Civ6 to only last for one cycle, and now people complain that World Congress is inconsequential. People complained that you could abuse AI by paying them to do war for you in Civ5, and now someone in this thread complains that you can't bribe AI into a war in Civ6. People complained about local happiness in Civ5, and now they complain about global happiness in Civ6 not being hard enough to manage. Etc. etc. etc.
When that's said, I do think there are some fair points of criticism of Civ6 compared to Civ5 (and I will not go back to former chapters, because those don't stand so clear in my memory). To give just some overall lines:
1) End game is just dead boring. Frankly, if you are not going to war, all eras after Industrial are just endless managing production queues - and talking about that, how on earth have they still not made a proper queue in the game? - and clicking next turn forever. They addressed this issue by reworking scientific victory ... by adding more techs and another era. Eeh ... not exactly the fix that was needed? Civ5 did a very good job with ideologies to add some refreshing new elements in late game, all we get in Civ6 is a diplomatic penalty for "different governments" because AI chooses to stick with their medieval government. Ugh.
2) World congress is objectively a mess in Civ6. You are left more or less completely clueless with regards to what the AI will vote and how many votes they will throw after a specific suggestion, so you can either a) memorize fixed AI behavior, b) save scum, or c) guess blindly. To add further salt to the wound, the way that vote cost escalates means that when more than about 4-5 AI civs are alive, they can always outvote you no matter how much diplomatic favor you work to accumulate. I know people complained about vote monopolizing through buying city states in Civ5 (which was indeed an issue), but new system is just worse.
3) Cultural Victory has become completely nontransparent. The way tourism works is a complete enigma to all but the very most dedicated players. I've read guides on it here on this forum, and I still don't understand it. They may have added rockbands and I know not what, but in Civ5, it was extremely easy to understand: Your tourism more than all their culture. In Civ6: Well, you do stuff and at some point, you may win ...
4) Poor balancing. They are working a lot on this, and credit to them for that, but look at something like Secret Societies. How on earth can anybody who plays this game just moderately well think that something like Voidsingers (here, take massive amounts of free faith in early game, then take free boost to science and culture in mid game, and then a unit that can make enemy cities rebel without any defense in late game) is balanced with Hermetic Order (take a blind guess that you may get these map lines, except you may not get them, or maybe they are placed so they screw up your district placement, and even if you get them, the benefits from them are mediocre until late game)?
I'm not saying I don't like Civ6, I have fun with the game and have played many hours, but it does strike me as underachieving compared to its potential.
A lot of this is essentially my complaints with civ 6. I think it's a pretty great game overall, but my big flaws with it are that there feels like there should be a lot more that you can do with it.
You have a lot of very interesting systems, you have a lot of new setups, but they seem to get about 75% of the way to a cool system, and then it just, kind of, stops. Like with secret societies - cool concept to add sort of a separate uniqueness/religion system, where you choose your option early and get some scaling benefits over time with it every couple eras. Neat, okay, but as you say, it comes in essentially very unbalanced, and then also just alters too much of the game with those 2-4 extra early governor titles, that it makes it a very polarizing setup.
Or you take spies, which is another system with a lot of potential. You have all the spies, you have some unique promotions, there's a little strategy in how to arrange them. But in the end, it kind of just ends up being a sort of tedious way to do something else, while you end up having to guess randomly where to "counter-spy", and you never really know if what you did has any effect.
Religious combat is another system which is new, heavily changes the way you can spread religion, but in the end, just ends up spamming the map, and in some cases, just encourages you to randomly suicide these units just so that I can create relics out of them. Granted here is a case where I don't 100% know what the right fix is, not like we need "siege" religious units or something like that, but it's like sort of making its way to this fun, cool, unique, new system, and then just stops right before the end.
Dramatic ages I still need to test a little more with, and so far, I'm fairly happy with the setup. Although it still feels like the system could use a little more balance I do kind of feel that the first era ends too fast in it, meaning you often will have a golden age with no bonus since it can take too long to get a wildcard spot, or else you get an early dark age which just means I need to restart the game, since losing 50% of my cities or so at that point of the game is just too much to handle that early. Too often everyone goes golden, which kind of defeats a lot of the point of it, although again, I only have a couple game experience with it, so that might skew my take on it.
Even some stuff with districts could probably use a little refresh. There's a lot of nice things they have done to tweak and adjust things, but there's still a lot more that could do to help them out. And it's still too imbalanced if you happen to get lucky and have a +4 or +5 campus site near your capital, that alone just has a crazy impact on your empire at such an early stage of the game that it has too much impact.
But as I said, I still play the game, and overall I do still find it fun. But there's just so many features that are still in the "so much potential here" phase that it frustrates you thinking what could be.