I guess I will need to find a different game to play over holiday break.
"Large" citybuilders have to fake things, because even a fast modern computer cannot simulate the lives of all the individuals of a 10,000+ person city.
If people want an actual person-to-person simulation, you need to go smaller and play games like Tropico or Rollercoaster Tycoon, or Two-Point Hospital. These games have hundreds to single-digit thousands of people at the most.
But the downside of these stricter simulation games is "instability". Small problems in a city cascade into larger problems. I've had Tropico islands collapse because of road traffic: no one could get to work cause they were stuck in traffic... so all my production stopped, meaning my trade stopped, meaning I pissed off the Soviet Union meaning they blew up my island. Most of these "smaller" games (Tropico/Rollercoaster Tycoon / Two-Point Hospital) all are "scenario based" instead of a long-term game based. You're only supposed to play a map for a relatively short time (a few weeks in my experience), and then start a new map with a different challenge. Its almost fundamentally a different game because the "instability" almost always hits at some point.
In contrast: "Large" city builders like Cities Skylines, SimCity, and the like, are focused on stability #1, front and center. Meaning many issues (like discussed in that Reddit post) exist to prevent said instability problems. (Ex: if my production is always working in Tropico, it wouldn't have collapsed. Tying your production to your workers sounds good until one traffic incident at a key road that bottlenecks your city literally shuts down your entire damn island and literally kills your game)
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I do prefer the lower-level, smaller, simulation games myself though. But they're not for everyone, as its much more punishing. Its very difficult to foresee all the ways in which a "societal collapse" occurs in these games. (Ex: In Tropico, you might build a High School, but the only one qualified to teach at the High School is your one-and-only Priest for the island. You force-change their job to High-school teacher using your communist powers / job-assignment powers, and suddenly everyone's waiting for Church to start but not getting serviced, meaning they're not going to work meaning your trade has stopped meaning the Soviet Union blows up you island)
Tropico 6, the newest in the series, feels like easy-mode though, and might be a better balance between "stability" and "simulation". Tropico 6 IIRC decided to stop simulating traffic so carefully: the cars just ghosts-through each other, so there's no way a traffic situation puts you into a death-spiral anymore. Carefully deciding what
NOT to simulate, to provide the players with the most fun, is a big debate item and a huge differentiator between these simulation games. Traffic isn't completely braindead though: cars (even if they seemingly ignore traffic problems at intersections) still have their time-simulated, so all the Tobacco that needs to be transferred to the Cigar factory, and all the cigars that need to be transferred to the Cargo Docks all require your Teamsters to drive over, arrive, load up, and move the goods across the island. They just got rid of "one" blocker that was devilishly hard to manage in previous games... traffic.
But you still need to think about how many Teamsters to hire, the wages you pay them, how happy they are, how close the Teamsters are to their needs (Church, Food, Entertainment, Homes). Because each individual logistics dude is simulated, and jobs don't happen unless they're on the clock and actually moving stuff around.
