I’ve been meaning to answer this.
Have a look at the year Carcassonne was published. We were fresh from the 90s where euros were a bit more interactive than these days.
So the way this was played among my friend-circle back then (and also the reason I no longer play Catan) is that you would take any opportunity to block someone or do anything to mess with their plans. This means runining their chances of making the meadow bigger, placing tiles in such ways they could never score a city or close a road and obviously try and get into the same city or meadow as someone else or even better get in with the double meeple or just one more and take their points away. One of my friends to this day gets called out as “Wiesenleger” when she is being overly competitive in a game 
(Wiese = Meadow, legen = lie down, because you will put your meeple on the side in the meadow). If you don’t take every chance of blocking others, are you even playing? That’s how Catan was played but in Catan you just aren’t in the game at some point and you know it. Carcassonne usually isn’t that obvious because that huge city could–in theory–still score.
And then pigs entered the game… and it got… worse 
In any case, I still enjoy playing a game on the app every once in a while because the way tile placement and pattern matching/completion works in this game is somehow quite satisfying. I am not very good at it these days. I think it holds up far better than a lot of games from the era because it is so incredibly simple and it has this amount of interaction built in. I will probably not propose playing it but I would play if someone asked for it.