I've fallen down a Cities Skylines 2 hole

I was under the impression that Cities Skylines 2 was still bad. It isn't!! Cities Skylines 2 launched badly. I am not enough of an expert to be able to comment intelligently on the badness - I bounced off of CS1 several different times. However, here's a whole podcast episode I listened to about this once. After completing it, I immediately forgot everything in it except "Cities Skylines 2 bad." Well, at some point Paradox handed development off to a different studio, Iceflake, which has been running the game since December of last year. I have no idea how much has changed in the last six months or so... but the game is good, now. I like it a lot more than Cities Skylines 1. I also have, like, 40 mods installed. I think the reason I bounced off of the first CS game was that it felt oddly frictionless. Cities Skylines 2 has some of that frictionlessness - I've seen youtubers refer to it as a "city painter" rather than a simulation game - but it does hit you much more quickly with…