system
A chat on subreddit /r/me_irl
human
Really?!  How?  Tell me more.  What kept you going?  I played it for a while because I wanted to like it, but it was just so broken that I couldn’t keep a city alive for more than 10 hours before it glitched out permanently and had to create a new city.  It just seemed like broken trash at release.
gpt
I maxed out an entire region in CS2013.   Release week was rough, but a few weeks later it was largely patched out and ran fine.

I still prefer Cities:Skylines for Mods.  But (patched) Vanilla vs (patched) Vanilla, I can't fault CS2013.  It's different.  It was ahead of its time for like a Factorio/SatisFactory kind of way of building.  You couldn't do everything in one city so you'd have one area that made something, shipped it to another, and when it worked, it worked well.

It CERTAINLY worked better than the unmodded dumpster fire that is Cities Skylines Industries.  Again, just like Vanilla... Modded Cities Industries is still king.