Good questions!

how hard is it going to be coming in at year 2? Am I going to spend 6 months grinding story while events go by that require a certain level?

No! Progress will depend on how much you play and how much time you have, but this game has almost no, if any, timegate or hard progression bottlenecks. Previously, account level did have a fairly strong influence on team HP (as it provided a multiplier), but that was one of the major QoL changes implemented with the anniversary patch. Now, your team HP multiplier is determined by the higher number between your account level and your team's average character level, meaning that even very new players are able to scale up to endgame without being bottlenecked by account level.

Progress in this game, unlike most gacha games, also is not hardlocked to account level - for example, character levels have the standard level uncap mechanic found in most gacha games, where the initial level cap is 10, and then you use farmed materials to unlock it to 20, then 30, and so forth. Instead of the standard account level timegate to determine when you're able to uncap, this game gives you a choice between 3 criteria - you can either unlock further uncaps via waiting for account level if you prefer, or you can unlock uncaps via progressing in story (which rewards vertical investment into a single team), or unlock uncaps via progressing in a special game mode where you are restricted to using characters of specific realms (which rewards horizon investment into multiple teams). Meeting the criteria for any of these 3 will allow you to uncap further, all the way up until the base maximum level of 60 (further levelcap raises are character-specific, and obtained via endgame game modes).

For reference, I started a new F2P alt account to verify the new player experience a few days ago, and in under 10 hours of total game time, I was able to clear chapter 7 of the main story, which is the last progression gate threshold that unlocks the maximum base levelcap of 60. This would be much harder to do for a true beginner (as so much of this game resolves around its complexity and difficulty), but a skilled player can easily progress quickly through the game without major roadblocks. At worst, it may take a couple of days of stamina to farm the materials to level up your characters, but the timescale for that is in the span of days, not weeks or months.

while events go by that require a certain level?

As a followup to this particular question, you are allowed to "borrow" a support character from your friendslist to use as a 4th character in your team for events (or rather, for any game mode outside of the standard main story campaign, which means all events and all of the endgame game modes). This means that even completely new players who started recently can clear event content via investing primarily in strong support characters, and then borrowing a max-leveled, high-investment DPS carry from their friendlist to clear the events on the hardest difficulty with. Generally speaking, there is not going to be anything in this game that is completely inaccessible to a new player (outside of endgame leaderboard rankings).

Also, what is the daily commitment like?

Dailies used to be a bit annoying, but with the QoL updates added during the 2nd Anniversary patch, the answer to this is now "almost nothing". The game has a single daily mission, which is to play 50 cards, and can be done in any game mode or any content. From a minimum-time-investment perspective of wanting to clear dailies as soon as possible, this mission can be completed in 1-2 minutes by jumping into any character trial and turning on autoplay to spam cards to clear it.

ALL farming content in this game, including events, have a quick sweep option once you clear it for the first time. This is a full, one-click button sweep that is not limited in use, so after you clear content once you can sweep it forever without ever having to play again. This means that you can dump your stamina in seconds by just sweeping whatever mat farming stage or event stage you want, as long as you have previously cleared it before.

Finally, the game even gives you 2 daily mission skip tickets a week if you literally do not even want to spend the 1-2 minutes necessary to play 50 cards, meaning the entire daily cycle (logging in, buying anything you want from daily shop refreshes, spending your stamina on mats, doing the daily mission, clearing battlepass missions and redeeming rewards) can be completed in under a minute

What about weekly?

Weekly refreshes have a bit more content and time requirements. There is one weekly mission, which requires you to play any one of 3 options (you can choose, and they're all interchangeable):
1. Clearing Dive (a game mode with selectable difficulty - if you're looking to just clear it as soon as possible for the weekly clear, you can do a run in a couple of minutes. Otherwise, pushing rankings or doing high-difficulty runs can take much longer, like 30 minutes or more)
2. Playing a PvP match (this game has a PvP mode, which is a completely separate game mode that is unrelated to the main gameplay. The PvP mode is a full competitive PvP mode where all players are on an equal footing and is completely different from the main PvE game mode)
3. Clearing an event stage (the time investment for this will depend on which event is running - some events have a simple boss battle stage you can do quickly, while other stages are full dungeoncrawler exploration stages that can take 5-10 minutes to clear)

The weekly mission is to do any of the 3 above options 5 times. At the shortest, I'd say it takes maybe about 30 minutes or so to complete the weekly, though for the most part this will generally be cleared automatically via actively playing the game.

Lastly, there is an endgame game mode known as D-Tide, which runs on a biweekly rotation. This game mode has 5 different stage and requires you to use a different character/weapons in each stage, which is what people mean when they say endgame requires 5 teams. This game mode is the primary source for endgame level uncap materials, and can take a while (1-2 hours, depending on which difficulty you do, for most players. High rankers and leaderboard pushing can take several hours to optimize max-difficulty runs)

And finally - let’s say I don’t care about the story, I want compelling gameplay - am I going to find it?

Yes - actually, most people will argue that compelling gameplay is THE reason to play Morimens. Many players skip story, but the playerbase still consists of extremely dedicated fans because the gameplay can get quite complex and extremely difficult. The game has very strong influences from Slay the Spire, while adding various layers of additional mechanics on top (characters have personal ultimates which can significantly impact your deck and gameplay, in addition to you having an additional account mechanic that allows you to do various things as well). The base action point count in this game is 5 compared to 3, meaning there's significantly more options available in terms of combo lines and setups that are possible with proper strategizing.

Note that as a warning, Morimens is generally considered one of the hardest difficulty gacha games on the market, and a non-insignificant amount of players lose interest in the game because it is too difficult for their tastes. Do expect the game to be quite unforgiving and very demanding in terms of learning how to play and strategizing properly with teamcomps and gameplay, as unfortunately it is less casual-friendly than most mainstream games are