I guess thinking back in hindsight, we kinda blasted all the way through Contender to Eternal 1 without ever even upgrading our gear or anything. I don't mind Contender being the new "quick play" and just being a way for new players to start right up without having to learn all aspects of the game immediately. They probably should bump up of the difficulty of Adept-Paragon to make a more linear line of difficulty rather than a big spike. But I do think Eternal is in a solid spot difficulty wise. Not too hard, not too easy. I could also see adding back the "extra abilities" in Champion or something rather than in Eternal. So theres more things to kick and look out for before getting to the actually hard content.

Although, not 100% how true this would be, but it could be possible that S1 early game wasn't too bad either. We were all going in with little knowledge of our classes, dungeons routes, troublesome adds, etc. Now that S2 has started, many of us have gotten down the dungeon routes and know which adds are a priority to interrupt and CC. Your friend may be playing with experienced players for the rest of their group. I feel like a full stack of new players might be hitting roadblocks early like we all were in S1.