I feel there's a few things interacting here. My experience in Planet Zoo comes after a long period playing Cities: Skylines, which has a very leisurely approach to management.
In Planet Zoo, for pretty zoo building, play in Sandbox. Franchise needs to be different, there needs to be challenge and that is going to come from handling species selection, habitat construction, breeding and staff management.
Having said that, the game clock make things too manic at times. The average player should never have to pause the game in normal play - only when building and decorating habitats and other features of the park. The speed of the game should allow you deal with the alerts and trade animals and still have time to enjoy watching your animals for a decent amount of time. If you can't take time to enjoy the animal animations (which obviously need the game to be unpaused) then you could be in any generic management game as all you are doing is balancing resources at a numeric level.
As previously mentioned - I'm from a city builder game background - even there power and water management is tedious, but at least you normally have a sensible approach of auto joining via proximity, pipes/cables to bridge gaps and a capacity based limit for each facility. PZ's circle zones are a poor implementation and the maintenance requirements are horrendous - as is the speed of habitat barrier degradation. The 'poop under shelters' issue also needs resolving very quickly as it leaves the player having to periodically move things so that the keeper can properly clean a habitat. This all adds unnecessary micromanagement in areas where the game mechanics should handle it as long you have enough staff and appropriate work zones.
A lot of the annoyances would be reduced at a slower game speed - the slowest should probably be about 1/4 of what it is now. Power and water needs to be rethought or have an auto-manage switch - it adds exactly nothing to the game.