That seems to be the case, tho personally I don't like it that way. Makes it nearly impossible to make an Ai who dosnt like you start to like you at all without giving massive bribes. Even then that dosnt do much. You end up with the ones who kinda like you just liking you more, and the ones who hate you hating you even more. Then the ones who hate you start complaining about stuff and you can't even offer them a simple open border's treaty to fix it.

You should always be able to offer a treaty in my opinion, just if they hate you it should cost a lot more. And what makes it worse is that on larger maps when you finally meet a distant Ai, they automatically get so many different negative opinion traits that they hate you from the get go, with no way to ever make them happy. I think the +diplomatic traits and bonus from the embassy are supposed to help with that but they seem to be broken to.

And finally the biggest nail in the coffin for me which makes it harder again, all the tooltips for the treaty's when they do show up in the list are wrong, so you have no idea what your evening getting from them.