I must say, what a relief that we as a community have overwhelmingly established that Civ VI is in no way designed or intended to be played as a historical simulation! After all, now it can be acknowledged, should one be inclined to play the game that way, a combination of mods can yield rather satisfactory results. I'll just bring up two of many possible scenarios.
Historical Spawn Dates
p0kiehl's Better Pantheons
Religion Expanded
Rosetta
Sui Generis
Tomatekh's Historical Religions
Yet (not) Another Map Pack
1) The Ancient World
Just choose any ancient civilization with the basic settings of HSD on Greatest Earth Map and you can enjoy a nice run through history with up to 63 civilizations and 16 relatively accurate religions (subject to civilizations sharing overlapping religious preferences). You can colonize the Mediterranean as the Phoenicians or watch the AI establish sprawling empires under the Romans, Persians, and Indians, all without ever encountering Teddy Roosevelt until his proper time.
2) Portugal and the New World
Choose a bunch of pre-industrial civilizations to fill out Europe and Africa, along with a mix of pre-Columbian and colonial nations from the Americas, then load up the Giant Earth Map with the Colonization section. Using the HSD Lite settings, all the Old World civilizations will spawn at the beginning, whereas the New World civilizations will spawn at their relative dates. I'm partial to Portugal, as even with two cities, it's an absolute tactical nightmare fending off the Spanish forever war, all the more once navies get involved. If you can make it through micromanaging your sliver of coast, Cartography will let you colonize the Americas and then watch your colonies rebel and form new nations. If you choose for new civilizations to match the highest level of tech and culture, Brazil will even use containment to kick you out of all New World city-states!
Beyond this, you can add modded civilizations, adjust the resources with mods (including Resourceful 2), and tweak a number of other settings. I even booted up both scenarios today to make sure they load. I suppose it goes to say the base game offers little by way of historical simulator, but the modding community has come up with a lot of ways to make such a play style possible.