I think Witcher 3 is the closest we have right now. Novigrad is a fantastic city and I loved to immerse myself in the game, I even played it without the minimap because it makes you think about your environment much more (NPCs even gave clues where you had to go for a mission in their speech!).

But yea I generally feel the same, that there are no open world games that manage to accurately portray a city (including residents and traffic).

I think the better route than trying to chase realism is using a stylized version of a city. Mirrors Edge does this particularly well imo. "The Ascent" is probaby the best detailed cyberpunk "world" right now (I haven't played it). From what I've seen that game has insane amounts of detail and they make it work by not trying to immitate real life and giving players access to a city but having custom built areas that mimic some aspects of a real place.

I'd love to read more about the whole virtual city topic etc. I feel like it's under-discussed.