Alternatively, a tough conversation needs to be had with the team about complying with unity's way.
Battlebit runs on the same engine, but I think they made exactly the right trade offs to achieve their experience.
I don't care if the game world looks realistic. I just want it to be fun. Simulations are a nuanced point of this, but even so if CS2 looked no better than the original, I probably wouldn't have noticed.
I guess the answer is an unfortunate "we did not" as of now. Real shame because the ideas of a proper DOTS renderer (not a literal renderer, moreso an ECS oriented way to deliver data to the GPU. Likely HDRP/URP) was one rumbling for years. And probably still is. And with all the industry layoffs/leavings I hope they don't drain too much of the brain to get that off the ground.
"The cause for unnecessary geometry is both the lack of simplified LOD variants for many of the game’s meshes, as well as the simplistic and seemingly untuned culling implementation. And the reason why the game has its own culling implementation instead of using Unity’s built in solution (which should at least in theory be much more advanced) is because Colossal Order had to implement quite a lot of the graphics side themselves because Unity’s integration between DOTS and HDRP is still very much a work in progress and arguably unsuitable for most actual games"
https://blog.paavo.me/cities-skylines-2-performance