Yes but consider all the added yields from things like "A meteorite is found" which comes very early and adds things like culture or faith to buildings. These things add up quite a bit and are exponentially boosted by other buffs. Whether or not it's more difficult to play with or without events is definitely open to debate.
FWIW I also have never had anything like this, playing with the most recent version. I just get the same boring few events over and over again, usually of the form "choose to either lose tile improvements or food/prod", or "choose to lose pop and buildings, pop and money, or buildings and money", with the occasional "get lots of food now or pay to get increased food yields for a long time". I'm happy to fiddle with the difficulty level to whatever is appropriate for me, but after I've seen the same events repeated ten times it's stopped adding anything fun to the game for me.
Contrast with e.g. the natural disasters in Civ 6 which I found quite fun, causing damage but also increasing yields, and you can settle cities planning for those eventualities.

