This applies to the real humankind as well, but rn I'm venting about the game
My 3rd play-through, each time I had to just give up because bugs just pile up. Can't make peace, can't make war, this last time the game told me my civilization had fallen when an AI captured the last city of another AI...
Really? I had a ton of stations on two continents and I don't even know how many hundreds of maker's quarters with industrial infrastructure upgrades and the overall global pollution never even got to the level where it has any sort of mechanical consequences, and I only ever saw one territory go above "very low" pollution locally and that was one that was completely filled up with districts, something like 90% of which were industrial.
Like I was able to do the endgame projects in a single turn each with a fully industrialized economy and pollution just never came into play except for like 3 turns where it caused a city's target stability to drop to 0% from having "low" pollution instead of "very low," which immediately went away as soon as I built a nuclear reactor and unlocked fusion (and the entire nuclear research chain took three turns to research, because I got two of them done in the same turn because endgame research costs are laughably low compared to how much science you're producing in the endgame).