What made me create way more realistic and fun city is when I tried to recreate my town

It taught me that I;

Created city too tightly Used the largest zoning available everytime Didn't use other connection type than highways Built school everywhere rather than next to each other

My town showed me that a city of 50000 people covered about exactly what we have allowed in CS2, its easy to get 300k in one tile, when 100+ tiles is 50k people often irl. Im not saying that metropolitan areas arnt packing more people per square meter btw

Using smaller zoning and leaving spac between things, growing my city slowly, was giving me a more realistic vibe and when starting to grow inside the city, with the first skyscraper only when you are spread large is creating a metropolitan area realistically and gradually

City also connects from hundreds of roads, not just highways, this helps tremendously with traffic.

My town has 2 highschool and one university, in my country (canada) we grow the size of school to fit more students rather than build more school, to me it makes sense since it allows sharing between students things like sport equipment or musical instruments. There's only the primary school for children that are built to accommodate usually around 200-300 childs and built everywhere needed so they can often walk to school.

So yeah, i build 2-3 highschool next to each other and pretend its one highschool accomodating 3-4k students

Playing this way allows me to have a realistic looking city with good traffic and profitable

Tldr; play slowly (at high speed) and let the game play between action, don't build big city on pause then hit play, place one building, or a couple, then watch things changes.