Honestly, this was likely for the best. With the direction of sims 4, I don’t think Sims 5 would have done well, yes I was interested in it but, I fully expected it would be a game I was passing on due to corporate greed. Sims 4 was missing critical core mechanics for the sims games, relying on DLC to add it in postfacto. it has the same clock bugs that sims 3 had, without the requirement of the game being a longlasting game with a lot of items, and was missing base items that was logical that a life sim would have (like alarm clocks… lol) I think them releasing the sims 5 with that tendancy in their studio would mark the end of the genre for them, and I think they knew that.
The Sims 4 was an online game forced to be single player. That’s why it’s so broken. Lots have to be instanced, unlike 3, because they were basically lobbies for players. Showing them all would have been too much data.
This isn’t to say The Sims 5 would have been good but, assuming it was single player from the start, it couldn’t have been worse. I would have pirated it probably.