Perhaps not, but cities are so very complex, with many, many moving parts (so to speak) and one of the cool things about city building games is that it helps you interact with something remarkably complex.
You can start a city from scratch on easy mode. When I haven't played for a while, it's common for me to get tripped up by something stupid and have things go sideways.
Fordlandia and other real world efforts to build a city from scratch in the middle of nowhere are generally infamous for having gone sideways. It's quite hard to create a functional city from scratch with all the right moving parts and once things go sideways, it's hard to come up with the money to fix the problems, assuming you can even identify them.
You overbuild X and it has knock-on effects of Y and Z that didn't predict or forgot was likely and now you've painted yourself into a corner.
Real cities tend to start as a nexus on some transit hub, such as a port at the mouth of a river where the terrain creates a natural port and you don't need much to make it a functional commercial port. Quite a few American cities can trace their origins to being a rail stop on a rail line.
Towns can get born or die when new highways get built, depending on whether they are on the new highway or whether the new highway causes traffic to pass them by. Historic small towns on Route 66 were born from traffic passing through them and many of them "died" (or greatly shrank) when Route 66 was replaced was modern limited access highways.
If you don't have enough water and electricity, no amount of tax breaks or pro-business government policies will grow your industrial base. Add water, electricity, trains and a port and now you have enormous demand for industry.
Of course it doesn't model "actual cities." Models always have their limitations and it's helpful to understand what those are, but you have start somewhere for developing mental models for the complexity of all the moving parts of a living, breathing modern city.
Our failure to wrap our minds around that seems to me to be a root cause of a lot of the small town blight and related social issues happening in America today. (This may also be a factor in problems in other countries, but I don't feel qualified to speak to that.)