As far as I know, it's not really broken, it's just that it needs to simulate hundreds of thousands if not million of people and a bunch of other stuff too, although most of it probably comes from the population. The devs have optimized it a bunch, so I imagine there aren't all that many low-hanging fruits remaining for the simulation, but it could sure use some more optimization too. Still, it's perfectly playable in typically-sized cities, but if you want something larger, expect simulation slowdown unless you have enough cores. It's a fundamental challenge with the agent-driven simulation model and something other games have struggled with too. I've mentioned Farthest Frontier here in the past, and for the longest time, I think the game had challenges with larger populations - and in that game, larger populations mean hundreds or thousands, not hundreds of thousands (my understanding is that they got the situation under control after significant optimization efforts).

Older SimCity games, on the other hand, didn't use agent-driven simulation, so they weren't as demanding, but I suppose that approach has its limits too. I guess it might be one of the reasons SimCity 2013 was limited to such small cities - my understanding is that it switched to agent-based simulation, so it just couldn't handle as large cities. I don't know how much that really contributed to the smaller city size, but at least superficially, it seems to make sense.

Grabbing Blue Prince, Hades II and Silent Hill F via sales. Maybe Tsushima as well.

If I were you, I'd try to buy now the parts with memory chips in them, RAM, storage, GPU, because the prices will only get worse.

Also, a new PC for Neverwinter Nights 2? You mean the original or the new version that launched during Summer?

It would not just be for that game, old or remastered. I still have a few new games in mind I would like to play.

I don't remember if I've written about it here, but for a while, I had an issue where after booting up from sleep mode, my PC would not wake up. When I shut it down from the power button and powered it up again, it would take a while and then resume from hibernation, as if it had been sleep mode all along. I felt kinda gaslit from that initially. Anyway, the issue was getting worse, so I very recently updated my chipset drivers, and... so far so good.