I wanna say this is a possible symptom of people who beat the game ages ago, put it down for a year or so, returned for the DLC completely not warmed up, and then perceiving it as insane difficulty off the bat

Im actually surprised that I have liked it as much as I have. Im a horrible gamer when it comes to reaction time and man I hate the platforming. Once I got used to accepting dieing, running around to grab stuff and not worrrying about surviving after, and search cheese X on youtube its been fun. Sorta heat attack, stressing fun. Fun I sometimes want to avoid :)

The scadutree buffs are pretty big from what I can tell, I've got a bunch becauae I explore a lot on first runs and it seems to be at least 3-4% boost to attack and defenses, with some of the new talismans too found there's a lot of stuff to work with.

So far, feels pretty well balanced, it has challenge but I've not encountered anything that made me question how I died, first few big fights were pretty well telegraphed and super enjoyable. What I really like is that you can go try something else if you hit a wall, go level up a bit, try new gear or different approaches

Knowing how the vocal minority thinks, they're probably deliberately ignoring the advice because they think any form of preparation or mitigation is cheating.