Historical strategy games were always like this, not just AoE. Civilization, Empire Earth, Rise of Nations etc. I mean you have the Americans as a faction in Rise of Nations, Americans as in the USA, and you can play them from the ancient age and make some epic American hoplites and slingers.
Sure, it was always a bit silly to have the "teutons" apply to germany, italy, and in some cases franks all across like 1400 years, or have the "britons" fighting the "celts".
I'm more referring to the believability of the tech trees for those new civilizations. For all the europe-mena-asia factions we know they just generally mean "the people who lived in this place at any given time" which works for dark age through imperial. Even the mongols worked fine when we consider they conquered china early on and got all that tech, and the "celts" were able to steal and bribe things from the british.
But mesoamerican tribes never had anything remotely resembling onagers, scorpions, or armored rams, or even watch towers really. I understand using the
skins of champions and arbalests for infantry, but at the same time asking me to believe their infantry units would be as effective as armored knights is absurd in a way none of the prior factions were. Really the aztecs shouldn't have been in AOE2 at all, that was a post imperial age vs dark age event.
And then when they started having things like the malians and ethiopians have full blown massive buildings? Indians was also a reach.
Basically things made a lot more since when it was Europe-Mena-Asia because these places did interact and trade knowledge. There were some things that didn't add up but they weren't trying to act like tribal mud hut empires were building chemistry researching universities and castles.
It was a desperate political correctness move to stay off the inevtiable claims of "eurocentricsm" when there's dozens of European civs more deserving of a faction than anything from africa
I've recently learned this with black people as well, a mixture of my own interactions and the cornstartch thread on here. A lot of them seem to act like drinking just water is unhealthy, it's fucking weird.