What should amaze you is that it sold at least 3000 copies!
Everyone knew that there would be always online DRM at launch, and people still bought it. That is amazing if you ask me.
The DRM was expected.
The game being literally unplayable was not.
Read through this thread.. It took month(s) before the game would even reliably open for people.
You would work on a city for weeks, fighting traffic, getting roads perfect, FINALLY chugging along (even if only able to open the game 1 in 5 times). Just to open it and find your city is gone. Disappeared. No local saves, no way to recover.
And in the midst of the MASSIVELY broken gameplay and servers, what is EA doing? Releasing $$$ DLC. Nissan electric chargers. It was seriously just a smack in the face of it's customers, that they're spending time churning out DLC while the game is still unplayable.
Even after 2-3 months, when finally it was somewhat reliable to open and play (but you still can't trust your city won't disappear), the city sizes are still absolutely miniscule. And as tiny as the spaces are, the roads/traffic are so broken that you can't fill them up anyway.
You have to go use online guides to find the tricks/hacks to make traffic work.
The game might as well have been call sim traffic. Seriously. 90% of the game is forcing traffic to work within the bounds of the broken game.
And.... Even once you're at the point you've figured out the traffic bugs, it becomes painfully obvious that the only goal is the game is to be profitable. It's not even about city building or city managing. Once you're 20 hours into a city it's literally nothing other than a simolean generator.
As someone who spent 100's of hours in sim city 2000, and quite a bit of time in sim city 4... It's just a travesty, an absolute shame what EA did to this franchise.