If you don’t enjoy it, don’t discount the franchise. Personally I prefer civ 4 over civ 6, and civ 4 has the bonuses of 1) being the only video game to ever win a Grammy award and 2) extensive voice work by Leonard Nimoy
I'll back up that Civ 4 has been the best entry in the series so far.
Civ 5 is when they dropped unit stacking, which made combat much slower and more finicky since you couldn't just build up a massive deathball and tear across the map, and Civ 6 doubled down on that design space by tying city upgrades to individual tiles as well. They're not bad changes, and they do add more strategic depth to the combat and city-building, but they do make an already slow game substantially slower, since combats that used to be done in a turn or two now require several turns of rotating and repositioning units to get them in and out of the fight.
Civ 4 was the last "pure" civ experience, building off and adding to the previous games without sweeping mechanical changes to shake up the meta.
Too clunky and slow paced for me compared to previous installments. Also not a huge fan of how the different victory conditions/requirements were balanced compared to older games. They just crammed too many new mechanics in there for the game to flow like it used to. If you’ve never played civ before these things may not even bother you since you have no previous experience with earlier installments to compare it to.