Also if this was actually true nobody would play multiplayer. And many people only play multiplayer because the AI is dumb.
I think evidence of this in the popularity of matchmaking systems. Players engaging in that aren't primarily looking for meaningful human interaction (they often mute the chat), but rather a human-skilled opponent.
The dirty secret is that we don't know if we want that. So far we don't have technology to make Civ AI play remotely like a reasonable human (at least not on a consumer grade PC). So we have absolute zero data point on how players will react to that.