Managed to make a game end by Pollution without even trying, and in the route there I found out just how poorly implemented this mechanic is.

Local pollution gives an absurdly disproportionate penalty - just Low Pollution in a city is enough to give it -15 Stability Per District (this was resulting in over -1200 Stability on my Low Pollution city before I simply destroyed the airport and everything returned to normal), along with other percentage-based penalties to outputs.

Meanwhile, this world-ending, last-turn, catastrophic level of High Pollution gives the world a meagre -100 Stability (every city had way above +200 stability at this point, so a -100 was insignificant) and a laughably -20 food.

The fact that devs even considered that -20 food at this point of the game was something even remotely perceptible is a note on how little testing the whole endgame got. Each of my cities had way above +500 surplus food and maxed out population slots, -20 food was literally a completely insignificant penalty.

This trend can be seen in a lot of parts of the late game, like events costing you a whooping 200 gold when you're producing 5000 gold per turn without even trying, but I digress.

Also, there was no Fame Penalty for literally destroying the world, I still won the game as normal, and the ending was all cheery and upbeat and positive, with no mention of the human race dying out due to me polluting legacy.

The attached image didn't seem to work, here's a link:

https://imgur.com/NbEbzFA

Maybe the pollution penalties are jumbled. The world ending pollution penalty seems to be applying at low.