Cities: Skylines 2's economy isn't a sham, but it is bugged

gamesradar.com:

Cities: Skylines 2 features a robust economic simulation where individual businesses generate realistic demand for certain goods that can be satisfied either by local industries or by imports from outside connections. At least, that's how it's supposed to work - the reality is that these systems aren't working as intended, and while initial fears that the economy is a "deception" seem to be overblown, developer Colossal Order has acknowledged that there are some serious bugs to be fixed.

This all stems from a post on the Cities: Skylines 2 subreddit yesterday titled "all resource management in the game is a deception." The details are a little complicated, but basically this post found that commercial and industrial buildings don't actually need the goods they're supposed to demand in order to generate income, and that there's something seriously wrong with how imports and exports to external connections work.

With further testing, other players found that they were experiencing some of the same issues, but the results seemed extremely inconsistent. In this example, industrial buildings actually did take the goods they're supposed to need from local cargo terminals, but commercial buildings didn't. Further, it seemed like cargo terminals were driving their own need for external goods, regardless of what the city actually needs.

If all this seems confusing, I'm right there with you, but the basic gist is that the Cities: Skylines 2 economy is not representing the realistic push and pull of supply and demand that early advertising materials suggested it might. Many players, already frustrated by the game's awful performance issues, were not inclined to give the devs the benefit of the doubt on what's happening here, but