Looking at the benchmarks it's amazing how despite not having significantly more advanced gameplay compared to Civ 2, Civ 6 still manages to take up as many resources as a modern FPS.
Civilization uses a single-threaded, interpreted language for all of the AI and game logic during a turn. It's slow as molasses and hasn't benefited from modern CPU advancements.
For comparison, games like Factorio or Cities Skylines can faithfully simulate hundreds of thousands of entities in real time, but they use C++ and are multi-threaded.
Civ 6 is still a 2D (gameplay-wise) tile based strategy game with a cartoon art style. You can't even rotate the camera, there are plenty of optimizations they could've made graphics wise.
I think the complaint is that people would like to play Civ 6 on their low powered laptops. It's perfectly okay for the laptop to be awful for reflex skill based games because those are expected to require even more processing power.
