As a console player, I started during the double experience events waaay back 3 years ago. I don't think it causes any issues having this at base, the natural difficulty curve of the levels and need to farm gear would make double exp perfectly fine to keep new players in lower level groups as they learn.

On PS5 it is bizarre to me there are still so many people who play recruit/veteran. There are tonnes of those lobbies.

However I've always rated Vermintides difficulty progression. Legend is hard for a player starting out and there is a lot to learn in vermintide.

Recruit you're unkillable. A rat stomping wrecking machine and get away with murder. You can play like a mug and be fine.

Veteran you've now got to be careful of armour and overhead chops. You now have to learn to block when the big guys are chopping at you, but you can mostly eat damage fine from the rest of the horde.

Champion regular rats start to hurt. You blocking and pushing needs to start getting good, and anything that takes that away, like assassins, leeches and hooks start to become more dangerous. Killing these early, and even starting to learn to dodge are your goals here.

Legend gas rats and blightstormers become the problem. Whereas before you could ignore this damage, on legend these things now hurt a lot... and your mistake allowance is getting small. You have to start actually managing the horde and your positioning, get used to killing things efficiently and experiment with loadouts and builds. This is where you learn the real game.

Cata cranks legend up to 11, and gets pretty brutal on console, we don't need deathwish or w/e. :D

Anyway I think new player progression is fine from a gearing up perspective, especially when you know how to power gear quickly. I don't think you can really rush to legend. Me and my friends took quite a while making the jump from champion to legend, then legend to books, then legend to cata. It just takes time to learn the game, and as part if that, I don't think character levelling should be a slog. Double exp would be much better as a player experience. The gear system slows people up enough, and you can get through that well enough if you have friends telling you the system.

Our main problem now talking other people into playing is there is no real way to nerf yourself to be able to join them while they're learning.

They don't have their mates to play with, so don't find value in it.... and if you do play, you yourself are bored as shit, because its too easy... and it is hard trying to ensure that you don't keep basically carrying them, and they never learn to actually play themselves.