Cities Skylines is not a game that rewards strategy, because of how it works it is primarily about defending against and exploiting the simulation's deficiencies
It's definitely a drag battling cars most of the time. The path optimisation that forces them to all choose 1 lane when 3 lanes are available and go to the same direction is so annoying.
I would like a better alternative but eh, it's just spare time fun thing
I've been working on such an alternative for about 9 months now :) Here's a peek of one of the utilities for evaluating the building gen and a very small slice of the (~DOT compliant) roads, I'm still messing with the clouds https://i.imgur.com/gtmdj4D.png