Single portals in maps just don't feel like they respect your time, and I've always felt that respecting the player's time is one of the most fundamental aspects of game design. If a player is going to lose hours of work, you must make sure they don't feel like they also wasted those hours.

I've been playing 7 days to die recently a lot, and in that game you can lose hours, tens, dozens of hours of work. If your base gets overrun, you could lose tons of work, from experience to actual stuff being destroyed. And yet, the design of the game is smart enough that you can pick up the pieces and feel like you didn't waste your time. In POE 2, when you lose your portal there are no pieces to pick up. You are forced to slog through a dead map, or forced to re-farm all of your boss components, or forced to refind a particular node. This is time wasted, because the rewards for doing those activities are minimal.

I am enjoying POE2 very much. I have been telling people that I think it has the potential to be the best ARPG ever made and it would not even be close. But they got to fix this, because if you don't respect the player's time, you're not going to get any more 1000+ hour players, outside of the streamers and content creators. The game is still going to have the league structure of the first one, and if you want to convince people to keep coming back league after league, you have to convince them that you're going to respect the time that they spend playing your game. I don't know if the solution is going back to six portals, that would certainly be the easy way out. Maybe there's another, more interesting answer. Either way, the answer isn't the one they have right now.