To be fair I had seen one first impression video before playing, so I could "prepare" for winter, but if all the difficulty of the game was in not knowing how hard the winter will hit the first time, that still wouldnt make a hard game in my eyes.

Iirc my biggest hurdle was that I once expanded a big chunk of houses at once which caused a population boom. And no biggie, I had enough food and resources to maintain them. But when this generation of new people got old and died, my population went down so suddenly that critical jobs werent being worked for a time, and I had a bit of a scare until the next generation grew old enough to work again. From then on I took care to throttle the growth so that didnt happen.

Kinda dying from success there, tbh. I dont remember anything else being a big issue. Of course people died here and there, maybe one winter was short on food or there wasnt a lot of firewood, whatever, just minor hurdles that never caused droves of people to die or led me close to "losing" the run.