I don't see why it wouldn't? It could lead to some specific narrative scenarios, with hand-picked eras and a story tailored experience while it retains 4x mechanics.They could also try some quircky modes like Civ VI (one of the reasons why I like frontier expansion is that, they tried to experiment with formula even though it fell flat on the face here and there)

I might be the only one who would find this fun though. And I also would like to see more narrative around the cultures, giving them more identity, events, interesting choices unique to them and etc

What I would like to see, is that they expand onto diplomacy more, and somehow managing to attain balance but give some cultures unique perks due to historical records. It could lead to new found forms of governments that are so out of the box of what we know rather than sticking to just familiarity (there is already this in-game but it's subtle too subtle and for instance Assaryans can ignore open borders agreement and cross as they wish)