This, I am of two minds: on the one hand, I like the option to have customization, but on the other hand I don't want to be forced to scrutinize every single aspect of the game.
"Forced" is a bit strong. You can win any Civ game, even Civ 4 deity (which is the hardest) with far suboptimal micromanagement. You won't get liberalism in 200 AD that way, but you can win.
Even in Civ 6, the micro required to win deity is a fraction of what you can possibly do. The best players put up very impressive research/spaceship dates.
Civ6, I'll admit I didn't even try when I saw how close to Civ5 it was.
Visually, it's close. And they share 1UPT, but otherwise they're not that similar. Civ 6 doesn't have weird anti land competition incentives wrt expansion like 5; more cities are better, if you can get them. It balances trade routes better than 5. The combination of policy card slot usage/timing and builder micro leaves it second only to Civ 4 in micromanagement impact. The way the dual tech tree, cities, terrain, and policies all interact give a surprising amount of depth that just flat-out didn't exist in the "3-4 city tradition" or "~6 city liberty" days of Civ 5.
Militarily, there are investments you can make through tech, infrastructure, and policies. A tech lead is usually decisive, but not if the more advanced civ is going up against corps/armies with a great general and unit-boosting policy cards...then it's actually possible for the less advance nation to take favorable engagements/win wars without losing units. That's a big deviation from earlier titles, and creates another interesting tradeoff.
All of that is to say that while I hold Civ 4 still stands above the rest of the series due to its balance between competing incentives and best UI of the series, 6 makes a real case for being second best in the series. Also while its UI is bad, it's the least bad after 4's. UI before Civ 4 was awful, so many unnecessary inputs. It single-handedly gated me out of putting heavy time into Civs 1-3, because competing games of those eras were so much better to play (HOMM, Warlords 2-3, WC2/StarCraft as examples). In those games, a much smaller % of your time was spent knowing what you wanted to do, but blowing time fighting the game to let you do it.
Warlords 2 again was ahead of its time in "ending games that are over", too. It had a version of Civ 4's "domination" victory condition, in the early 1990s! Other than Civ 4, the Civ series largely doesn't even bother with a mechanic that lets you close out an insurmountable position early. When you can have 100s of units with bad stack management, or dozens to move with clunky interactions with each other under 1 UPT, the lack of consideration of the player in omitting such features is felt.
So true sadly. Maybe not ruined but more complicated than needed.
We see the pushback via indy games. If the demand for the aspects of play that made for quality experiences in old games weren't there, indy games would struggle to compete. Same if the big $$$ games could gather development teams that understand those aspects of design. But I guess the skillsets to create good art assets or make an engine run well do not often overlap with the skill to create intricate/dynamic game systems with meaningful choices. Probably why big budget FPS games actually do their job well sometimes.