I'm using the current decorators patch it is much improved. I really can't go back to CS1, the road handling tools in CS2 are so much less hassle but give me a lot of the control I want. I got very tired in CS1 of drawing lane connections so tediously. The way modding is now built in saves a lot of hassles, I had a lot of trouble with mods not loading when doing it so tediously before.
I'm now at a city with 350K residents, and the sim is starting to fall apart a bit, but speed is adequate, and I'm on a temporary computer Ryzen 7 computer right now while I wait for diagnosis of why my better computer crashes (on everything, not just CS), so I don't have exactly stellar graphics performance. I have to run it at at very low resolution but it is playable.
This is the first city I've ever built in any CS where the sims aren't complaining about traffic.