Mostly a backwater world with very few towns and cities, and with said settlements looking either really old and conservative (like in ANH and most EU media) or part old and part junkyard. Even in TPM this kind of aesthetic was kept intact, with only the Mos Espa arena being the only fancy looking place, while Mos Espa itself looks much like Mos Eisley in the special edition. Ancient, rundown, dirty, little architectural consistency and full of scrap and broken ships, as expected of a society mostly run by hicks and crimelords. Also what Traincake said.
Mos Espa was made a bit too big for its own good, but considering we never see the whole thing in full, the buildings we see in the wider shots still aren't proof enough of how much territory this town actually covers. And Mos Eisley was still holding the title of biggest even after this.
Even Tatooine's only human-controlled capital of Bestine wasn't that big or bustling, with Mos Eisley still being bigger and holding the title of largest city on Tatooine, and even with that it was still referred to as the Galactic Armpit.
(Pictured: Updated Bestine from a fan mod based on its description from the Galaxy Guides and a map of Mos Eisley center sector)
Now look at the size of this motherfucker, and this is supposed to be the same city from TPM which is supposed to be smaller than Mos Eisley.
And Jabba, who only had two to three starships at his disposal which were just glorified limos -
- now under Disney has a fleet of his own that can wipe out imperial forces like nothing.
Yet paradoxically said fleet is scared of one junky old freighter with a few non-existent missiles that Landonis lied about.
And despite how much Filoni fans like to laud the wolfaboo as being ultra faithful to pre-Disney shit or claiming that he'll retcon Disney, he retconned Jabba's palace to be in the outskirts of Mos Espa now despite his palace being far from any civilization in the film and being nowhere near Mos Espa in the map of Tatooine's main continent that was released for the prequels. With Mos Espa being far to the north in the Xelric region while Jabba's palace was far off in the isolated Mesra region.