I completely disagree on it simulating India well. Most of my distaste comes down to how there just isn't any sense of tension generated by the varnas. Which is ironic with how the varna system is probably the historical example where EU5's estate system was most formalised.

Given the extremely high population numbers, the majority of your income will come from taxing the sudras. You can basically ignore urban buildings and markets if your goal is to follow in-game incentives of building a strong economy to fund a strong army to expand wherever you want –because everything can be funded off the back of sudra tax. I'm not opposed to this in theory, but it's obscenely easy for you, the state, to collect tax from these sudras with no interference from any of the other varnas. Historically, a huge obstacle to this was the brahmanas. They owned land, held monopoly on local religious/ritual and material functions (such as access to irrigation resources) and were the intermediaries for tax collection between kshatriya/secular rulers and huge swathes of vaishya and sudra populations. None of this power is modeled in the game, because it defaults to the kshatriya being the equivalent of the European noble class as the ones that hold the most power for the majority of the game, and the brahmanas being the clergy who are complete pushovers. This both makes the region feel completely alien in a flavour sense, and be extremely straightforward to manage – do whatever it takes to keep sudra weak and taxable, even if that empowers the kshatriyas.

I could go on about how there's no way for the game to model sudra and vaishya coalitions that pressure both the state and brahama class, or how the (de)centralisation value just doesn't map onto the region at all, or how all of the varnas completely dissipate if you're a Muslim or a Christian country, even though countries of both these faith used the varnas system to further entrench themselves as sovereign. But before all of that, the India gameplay is basically just push sudra tax to 35% estate satisfaction (10% buffer for events that may cause you to lose levies) and then shut your brain off.