luckz

Cruel City was unnecessarily melodramatic in so many places...

Open ending, or something.

There was so much manipulation of evidence and willy-nilly non-investigation in this show, what you refer to is barely 10% of it.

The drama ends with a post-highlights ~8 seconds shot of the ML in a busy street wearing an out-of-character white suit and talking on the phone. That is the hint to him being alive, I suppose, though he looks gangsterish there none the less – and it doesn't make much sense that just a bit earlier his "ghost" appeared before the FL (in his old hideout).

The FL does not "like both MLs".

But here, it's more like 30% of the drug biz are actual police officers, or disgraced police-affiliated spies, or something like that.

Over here, at one point our far-right extremist party was so well-infiltrated that an alleged 15% of the leadership were police informers.

The writer's ill-conceived whodunnit from the early episodes ruins everything. It comes to an absolutely idiotic resolution and the last two or three episodes are far out there. I feel generous giving it a 5/10.
Some plot ideas get regurgitated so much that dialogue bits are copy-pasted as well.
The more Game of Thrones-y elements feel like they've been thrown in for pure shock value.
The OST variety is sub-par; the camerawork / direction / acting are fairly so-so. Every time I have excessively high hopes for a drama, they're crushed bitterly.

It's not really in any way shown, but also not exactly denied.
Maybe wouldn't have been "appropriate" TV material.

It's not just a "possible hint".

Where do you derive that from, besides maybe the ending shot with him wearing a white suit and talking on the phone?

Starts out as a C-drama.
Quickly becomes a non-stop Yakult advert with some HP product placement here and there.

(There's four different beverages that are peppered throughout the majority of scenes. Yakult is actually only one of them.)

The show never "really" decides what her "true self" is.

There's a hilarious scene in Thirty But Seventeen where the adopted animal, uhm, grows.

Given the premise is "the FL is impossibly rich, in an arranged marriage, and the ML is the snazziest idol singer in existence, and they are college deskmates because that was the only spot left", I'm not sure what kind of realism you expect from it.

There's one character who even gets a second loan later on, without his first one being paid off on-screen. ^_^

Counting tacked-on ending things there are four couples.
The other two are just thrown at you in the last episode.

No, no.
Gu Nanxi likes the FL (first as Qingchen and later also as Qingqing), but is crushed that out of loyalty to his lifelong best friend, he has to refrain from doing anything about it.

He's often the third wheel, for example with setting up the fireworks.

It's extremely rushed, yes.
There is a short bit about the grandfather formally setting her free, afterwards his health condition is never mentioned again, and after the timeskip the grandfather sends the FL's old best friend (who is SML's new love interest just to wrap things up even more), so it's implied he is still alive and fine.

The exposing guy was her original arranged fiancee and is never mentioned again / not relevant.
The issue of who runs the company is not addressed.

Unfinished threads are "excused" with the FL giving some silly speech that they're just halting the story there, when presenting her comic at the very end.

Yan Hao Yuan as Hua Mu Nian: https://mydramalist.com/people/20218-yan-hao-yuan

The first time he appears is as a stereotypical gay guy.