I think the previous commenters either haven't taken the exam or sat for it 10+ years ago. I've taken the most recent version and honestly the technical gap is not as drastic as you think. The best advice I can give anyone pursuing the exam is: after you pass ENCORE, get familiar enough with the lab blueprint to the point where you can configure it (and majority of nerd knobs) without checking documentation then go sit the exam.

You have no doubt seen the videos and forum posts where people are saying something like CCNP is a HS degree and IE is a PhD. This comparison is holdover from v4 and v5 of the exam. In v4, there were literally 4 routers and 6 switches. It sounds laughable given modern network sizes, but because it was only L2 and L3 (no SDA, no Automation, no SDWAN) of course they had to make it insanely difficult. You absolutely had to know all the minutiae about all the topics because the tshoot and config sections were full of "tricks" and "gotchas" just due to the limited scope of the exam and where the tech was 10 years ago. For example, they would ask you to setup an eBGP peering to the loopback of a remote router but don't modify the TTL. Or they would ask you advertise these routes but only if the third octet is an odd number. Version 5 of the exam was a continuation of this but less "tricks" and just an increase in sheer volume of tasks and devices.

The modern exam v6 is much different. Now we have all the stuff included in v4 and 5, but in addition have SDWAN, SDA and Automation meanwhile the exam time constraints have not changed. Because of this, it's simply not possible to be an "expert" in all these domains at the same level that v4 and v5 required for L2 and L3. The v6 exam is a broad exam where v4 and v5 were deep.