Yes, CO did bad releasing an unoptimized game, but if you put pressure for a cosmetic DLC to be removed you can’t be angry that they removed said DLC.

I strongly disagree with this for two reasons:

Nobody put pressure on them to remove the content from the game. "Removing the DLC" can be done in productive or non-productive ways, the latter of which happened here - a better solution would be to set it as non-buyable on Steam and wait with refunds until the patch has been released which allows people to continue playing.
It's not just grey boxes (which would be bad enough on its own - these people paid for the content, there's no technical reason for them not to have it right now) - the CO employee literally says:

Assets are replaced by the placeholder boxes, but as the waterfront zoning isn't available in the base game yet, I recommend holding off on loading saves with a lot of those zones.

So the people who bought the shitty DLC, as in the die-hard fans, can't play on their saves due to COs fuckup.