Alright, finally able to put my two cents in after playing a bit following my Winter Sale purchase. I love C:S1 and had most of the content DLC, and I really appreciate a lot of the assets that had to be paid for in the first game are now vanilla in C:S2, however I ended up putting my initial Steam review as "not recommended."
Here's some notes from my review:
Assets clip through environment including on-ramps that refuse to stay on top of the grass, support beams that appear on top of pedestrian bridges instead of below, and not a ton of variety for foliage and props. When things get busy, my midrange system drops frames pretty quickly (i7-7700k, RTX 3070).
Functionally, some vanilla assets are set up strangely, eg. there's an interchange asset set up where the highway has a slower speed limit than the on/off-ramps so cims will take the ramps instead of driving straight through, Cims disobey traffic rules, eg. set no left turn, some cims turn left anyway. There's no alert for a drastic economic shift like suddenly needing to import power or furniture, your budget board just flips upside down and no advisor or chirp tells you, "hey you're losing 40K an hour to imports now." It can be difficult to manage issues without constantly checking the info panels.
Overall it just needs more time and care. I like it as a base but it feels like early access right now.