To be fair, religiously, Ethiopia does still have an advantage in that they can produce Faith sooner (before they research any technology) and easier (they only need a monument they don't need a shrine) but I will agree that this mod does nerf there advantage (or rather it does sort of level the playing feild a bit).

A good solution may be to boost the stele's benefit and I have a few ideas of how to do that:

• Since steles could be used for funerary purposes having ceremonial burial increase its benefit could make sense; while it wouldn’t make getting religion easier it would make powering towards religion more profitable
  
• Steles could also be to spread laws but some were built before alphabet so having alphabet and/or code of laws increase steles’ benefits is an idea
  
• Finally, since (some) totem poles are steles either steles could increase totem pole’s yields OR idk if this is possible but an interesting approach might be to have steles replace both monuments and totem poles (w/ steles having double benefit plus the ranged promotion) so you could the benefits of building both just by building the stele and w/o having to research any technolgies

You're right — that is a good way to look at it .. changing Ethiopia is better. If I wanted to replace the totem pole, how would I turn it off?

If you wanted to completely remove the totem pole you could follow the instructions I provided in the errata discussion,

If you wanted to have the stele replace the totem pole in addition to the monument, let me first note that I do not know if it will work (I may test it out in the future idk).

What you'd have to do, though, is add a new row to the Civilization_BuildingClassOverrides table.
For the vannilla game this is found in this file: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Sid Meier's Civilization V\assets\Gameplay\XML\Civilizations\CIV5Civilizations.

However, for the civs added in G&Ks refer to this file: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Sid Meier's Civilization V\assets\DLC\Expansion\Gameplay\XML\Civilizations\CIV5Civilizations_Expansion

Civ 5 makes the stele replace the monument using this code:

To do what you want to do you'd to make a mod using modbuddy that contains an XML file w/ this code:

You'd also want code that boosted the Stele's yields. idk if you know how to make a Civ 5 mod but if not I may be able to provide a brief explanation or better yet direct you to an excellent tutorial.

Also, (I meant to put this in my last comment but forgot) since Totem Poles aren't really relgious in the next update I may make them provide a culture yield instead of a faith yield. No promises here; not saying I will, I'm just saying I'm thinking about it.