Civ 7 is like that. Similarly the debate over just why it feels different is hard to parse out. I have to mentally chew on this. I do think 7 is a different game.
Having thought about it…
One major change in Civ 7 that would restore the feel of Civ would be if you could place improvements anywhere within city radius not just adjacent to already built districts. The pacing, the tactile cadence of engaging near and far as needed with exploitable map resources helped create a sense of slowly encroaching on nature while symbiotically being interwoven with it for all civ games until 7. A notable example of this is building a city in a jungle biome before having the ability to chop jungle. How you are first subject to the land then begin to dominate and transform it but in a patchwork way.
The tactile cadence of that makes 7 feel fundamentally different. They could have kept that feel and still eschewed builders, just by letting you improve anywhere in your city radius. They also made biomes less dense with their core feature.
Civ 7 jungles have alopecia
As for the military, the age system simplifies and standardizes units, but it’s not like having a bunch of swordsmen tear through your warriors wasn’t a thing in previous games. I suppose though it is different. It was a big deal to research iron working, find iron resources and on top of that produce swordsmen. In Civ 7 it’s a simple upgrade in a short streamlined tech tree with relatively affordable upgrade costs. So it really misses an entire cadence of trying to set up to get particular units. The empire resources transform a constraint on access to unit upgrades into a bonus applied on top of them. I have yet to decide if it feels good. So far it just feels marginal (ie what matters more is having more units and a better economy). Even so, while the core concept of resources benefitting unit performance remains, the feel of it is totally different because a constraint that gates access is now just a minor bonus, although one which does stack.
OUPT may be worth mentioning, but we’re three games deep already with that so not sure it matters.
I’m sure if you went through you could find other ways the streamlining has completely altered game feel away from most core Civ experiences. Government, diplomacy.
My thoughts are that many of these systems lose so much “feel” in the process of streamlining that there’s no reason to keep them other than to say they did. Like, let’s just not have government. Let’s make golden age celebrations more customizable and unique instead of tying them to a forced “guys we still have governments” thing.
So Civ 7 falls short of its design ethos by masquerading as a Civ game.
You also could have streamlined, or at least just have improved past systems without getting rid of them.
Diplomacy could have remained the same but with a more intuitive and transparent affinity and agenda system. In other words, actually making a good UI and AI. Firaxis like many modern AAA devs seems to have a competency ceiling. Instead of iterating past systems to be improved over time due to working a problem for many years, they just mix up the formula and abandon progress.
