Members on Paradox's forums seem to agree that Glavius(?)'s mod does make the AI work much better even in 2.2. It's kind of funny, since I have no idea what a modder could change that would make the AI work better than what the developers already do. My guess is that the mod must give the AI some kinds of cheats, since if it's just adjusting build weights or other mod adjustable parameters, the developers would quickly adjust their own numbers to be closer to it. I'm pretty sure I saw something about at least one AI mod giving the AI instant troop transports to get around the "bombarding a planet for 50 years" bug, for example.
In my unmodded game, I was at first thinking that the AI was working okay, but now that I'm past the mid game I see that it's not. There's been one early war, plus lots of insults, rivalries and other diplomatic actions between the AI actors, but by 2320 it looks like the biggest fleet is mine at around 5K fleet power. Not sure if it's just the alloy shortage to blame either, since according to the score screen my empire has about twice the economic power of the next best empire, and over four times the research points. Those aren't limited by alloys. This is on captain difficulty, so the AI has some cheats to boost its economy, but not like grand admiral.
Unrelated to that, but I'm not sure that the droid and synthetics upgrades are working now. I know something was changed related to this, but after researching both techs, nothing seems to have changed. I still have "robotic worker" pops instead of synthetics. Do the robots just get a production bonus now? I also don't seem to have any increase in consumer goods or housing after researching it either, despite also giving AI citizen rights, and the robots' species rights say they're still under servitude.