As a non-native speaker, I sometimes have a similar experience when reading English books written in a rather ornate style, i.e. where I don't know some of the vocabulary: I can follow along just fine, I get the story arc etc., but the book just isn't fun because lacking the vocabulary I can't grasp the fine details of the atmosphere, the character descriptions etc.

Civ6 has a crazy amount of complexity to do basic actions - the complexity comes from the UI and all the rules, each city has a ton of things to build which each take many turns, there’s multiple skill trees of unclear benefits, there’s governments and policies, where you can build and what you need to build isn’t clear. During all of this kind of tedious action nothing interesting is happening.

I’d guess there’s a baked in assumption that people playing are already familiar with the game. The tutorial and in game recommended actions were not great.

I don’t mind some complexity (I like KSP, Starcraft) - Civ6 feels like a bad design problem.

Definitely! Multiple core mechanics are downright broken. Religion for example is a complete waste of time, as it has practically zero consequences outside of the mechanic itself. I can routinely beat the game while completely ignoring religion.

I'm still playing Age of Empires and Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance, so I may just be trapped in a time vortex.