I would make this a neutral review if I could, but since I overall enjoyed the game fine I will recommend it. I think the developers do a solid job with what they have to work with.
I haven't played one of these since 2021 so I probably got a lot more enjoyment out of this game than others. I like the new features that have been added since and I believe the AI has been definitely improved so it's not *as easy* to exploit them.

The IMPORTANT thing that I wanted to mention in my general review that really hampered my overall feeling of the game however was the, in my opinion, severely lacking stage collection. This game has quite a bit of races in its database but I think too many of them are relatively throwaway/forgettable stages that you'll likely be simulating after a few years into a save (flat races etc.). When I went into the "my tour" mode to check the available courses, I noticed that there are not many mountain (and medium mountain) stages which I think are the biggest and most interesting races.
When I noticed this, it made me re-install 2021 to see that it had a lot more stages (especially ones from previous years), ones like double Mont Ventoux were/are always fun to ride for me and 2024 has a lack of races like this. After only about ~3 years into the team save I had already played most, if not all of the stages in the game, which made the later years of my save significantly less interesting.
I'm sure the developers had their reasons for seemingly starting from scratch on the stage races even though they were bringing back other stages from year's past in the older games. However, I think a game series that releases yearly like this one could benefit greatly from continually bringing back races from older years to bolster its variety and replayability and I hope cyanide takes note of this because I subtly missed racing up mountains like Ventoux in this year's edition.