I wouldn't mind the stuffty always-online mechanics if they actually worked.
I have an oil tycoon city that's practically making bank and it's also loaded with oil power plants to generate power for everyone.
So I have a mining city in the same region set to buy all its power from the oil city, and woop de doo the loving servers can't figure out how much loving power it needs, so in between hopping between cities my metal refineries dip into -60 MW shortage. No smelters --> no metal exports --> no $31k income to supplement the -$6k/hour payments --> bankrupt within hours because the game won't loving process. Even worse I still haven't gotten the $1.5 million gift from my oil city to my mining city even though it's been almost an hour (gifts were working completely fine prior too, I had sent out at least 5 gifts earlier).
Setting up an oil power plant in that city itself (set to import) didn't help either. Didn't save it in time. Now it's just sitting there in limbo because apparently the designers have never heard of real deficits. Things don't just freeze up at $0 despite negative revenue.