A hypotetic case with a city, that is working 20 specialits, which consume everyone 9 food (due to the actual change). = 180 food consumption for all specialits. Reduced by 50%, you save 90 food. Food you have to compensate by working tiles with normal citizen, if you didnt have picked freedom ideology.
Ok, ive made a mistake. If you dont have chosen freedom, you have to get the 90 food by working tiles, instead of saving this by the freedom tenet. Also, you dont have the freedom tenet to improve farms by +2.
Leading to the result, you have maybe grassland tiles with farms and 4 adjacent tiles, giving you only 6 (
SIX) food. (Maybe 7, if you have the imperial social policy.)
Any growth multiplier cant be counted, cause you have to close the gap of 90 food, before your in food surplus (the moment, growth ist starting to count). How many modifers are in the game that give +FOOD?
Even if you get, lets say +20% food, and have imperialismn, that leads to 8.4 food per tile.
In this case, you need 11 more citizen, only working on plain food tiles to close the gap. If you count the nutritional needs of these extra citizens, you'll even need 14 citizens. (90 + 14*2 = 118 / 8,4 = 14)
In the end, you need 14 more population in your city, to get the same amount of food, as with the freedom tenet.
First problem: You need 14 more population in your city, and getting population is getting more and more difficult, where does all those people come from?
Second problem: Even if you have 14 more population, those produce only food, while in other case (freedom), those 14 could work mines / villages. Multiply 14 times the final hammer production of a mine, this is a hughe difference.
Third problem: More population leads to more unhappines, cause the unhappines is always bound to number of population.
Even if the +food multiplier is much higher, lets say +50%, this didnt change that much.
I accept, saying "gold generation in lategame is too much" is a generic statement. But I show you this numbers, and if you give me some values, how big late game cities and specialists use are in the new version, i can reconsider the numbers (with a big chance, they didnt change that much.)