As someone who's spent a lot of time on Cities Skyline 2 recently, I'd argue it's gotten a lot better. They have new devs that are actively working on fixing the game and I've had almost no bugs compared to 2 or 3 years ago. Would recommend giving it another chance

It wasn't too tricky to get running actually. I followed this guide, and after running it through the steam launcher it almost seemed like steam knew what to do to finish the job automatically? Considering I'm a novice at Linux it's fair to say someone with more experience wouldn't have much of an issue getting things working. I considered it a good learning process to get used to how Mint and Linux works.

Its interesting to think how best to modernise the game. Making it easier to run on modern systems would be a start. Remastering is interesting though - as the graphics are pre-rendered, you could potentially find a way to just upscale the textures? If you turned the models fully 3D, there is a 3D camera mod which is pretty cool but you'd need to upgrade the engine to render things faster and more accurately to fully take advantage of it. So a lot of potential, but there are things being looked at by the modding community that are really pushing the engine to its limits as is. As much as I'm deeply suspicious of it, it seems like the increase in AI capabilities has allowed people to push the frontier further than before, and faster. There's been some talk about reverse engineering, but who knows what will come of that.

Cities Skylines is at best a remake of Sim City 4. Its all copied, they only added some 3d tech stuff and made an annoying graveyard mechanic that gets old right away.

The trams are pretty cool though.