It’s always interesting that people say this, since I feel the exact opposite is happening. Not necessarily an increase in difficulty per se, but a massive increase in time commitment. It feels like compared to say like 1.12 it takes nearly double the amount of hours to achieve the same progression and way more time to do everything else. Like making farms has become mandatory for gameplay just to not waste insane amounts of time trying to actually play the game.

Now that I think about I might make a general post about this.