(Full disclosure: I currently only have hands-on experience with Tour's city courses through their original game, although I've watched a good number of gameplay videos of their MK8D renditions and I doubt my feelings henceforth would change if I were to actually play them myself.)
The disdain I see for Tour's city tracks, particularly regarding the fact that they're so "generic" and "same-y" is funny to me because, like... a lot of them exhibit a similar degree of gameplay variety to many, many courses from console Mario Karts. Only a few of them, like Tokyo Blur and Paris Promenade, really actually don't have a lot of action going, and yet it's precisely this quality that enables them to work so well as introductory courses, a role they embodied in both MK8 and Tour. I'm not saying the city courses are The Most Fun(tm) of the bunch, but most have enough turns, obstacles, and other such gameplay features that would earn them a place among the "interesting" courses.
Daisy Circuit and Moonview Highway are also urban-themed and I bet they wouldn't be nearly as popular if they were the exact same but called something like "Ibiza Pier" and "San Francisco Highway", because apparently a direct, explicit relation to the real world equals "mediocre".