That's the problem the leaders die way before they can achive their potential.
So this is partially intentional. They did almost nothing to leader lifespan, but they changed the level cap from 5 to 10. They said something about this making it unlikely that many leaders will hit max level before dying. If you don't like that situation, there are always some options available. Synthetic Ascension will make everyone more or less immortal, Biological can easily get more lifespan than the end-game crisis date (unless you extended it), and even if you don't go for any of them, set up a mighty research center and there are repeatable +5 lifespan techs in Society research.
People said I was imagining/making up/wrong about people criticising the entire update yesterday (mostly I suspect because they're mad about Leader cap and they refuse to take Aptitude) but here's one such example. The only really valid criticism I've seen is that there's no leader cap scaling mechanism at the moment; that would massively tackle all the other little bugbears other people have.
Oh trust me I take Aptitude. There are some pretty strong modifiers in there. I still find the Leader Cap a
terrible mechanic because, simply put, they used to have a leader cap and it was removed due to what I thought were pretty good reasons by the dev team (at the time, we are on a new dev team by now I'm 99% sure). Some reasons include it almost universally being reported as not being fun to deal with and also essentially being a "scientist cap" and making a lot of people feel like they can't use any other leaders. Even to anyone not trying to min/max, it's really easy for new players to see the correlation between "more scientists early = more anomalies and more systems surveyed to expand to". And splitting the leader caps by leader type won't fix this since unity is hard to come by early and people are not investing in governors when they could be investing in an expensive over-the-cap scientist. Unless the caps become "hard caps", which will upset significantly more people.
and the upkeep is horrible.
Leader Upkeep I'll grant you. Though this can be solved by either having fewer Leaders or by producing more Unity.
Yes, the upkeep can be rough, although different empires struggle with it to different levels. In general I've found Spiritualists (to the shock of no one) and Trade builds with a unity trade conversion to not have issues with it.
Also depending if it's governors you are struggling with paying, "Feudal Society" solves this and also opens some
interesting gameplay strategies.
