The trick with ATC is to when using IFR flight plan is to select an arrival path other than DIRECT. That seems to mitigate the altitude issue. Also check the Cruise altitudes before launching your flight. The default is always way too high. Most of the time I have flown on an airliner (as a passenger) the cruise altitudes were 35-38,000 ft. MSFS always seems to want to put you over 40000 ft. by default. Reduce that to 35-38K for airliners at least. I think the jets like the Cessna Citation can comfortably go over 40K, but I haven’t done an IFR flight with one of those yet, I just flew an unplanned flight VFR and took it up to 48K, but the AP didn’t work well, so I had to fly it manually.
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