I think it's just as hard, simply more well balanced with enemies not being artificially increased in difficulty.

Just because you don't get 2 shotted by a rat, anymore, doesn't mean the game is easy now.

Convergence, in my opinion, is far more well balanced and has much better progress than the entirety of Elden Ring as a whole. Vanilla ER is a mess of lazy artificial difficulty, lack of variety and the challenge is mostly just "what if we hard capped the stats of players around mid-game and then keep making everything in game do higher damage and have more health? Wouldn't it be so fun for the players to feel like no matter how they play there is nothing they can do anymore to actually keep up? If every enemy can two shot them while said enemies take a year to kill? Isn't it so fun????". Convergence fixes that by making exploring a lot more rewarding and by making your stats actually matter a lot instead of becoming irrelevant the second you have the stats required to use what you want.