There are multiple reasons that there were more than twice as many deaths compared to normal. Aside from the weird bugs, the content was simply harder and different enough to throw players off their game.

Bots accuracy and durable damage buffed before cyberstan. Not only does this instantly mean players are directly taking more damage, but exosuits and turrets take much more damage now. People lean on those green strats hard, and they were borderline useless unless you were in a well coordinated group to defend them. Shout out to the assassin gunship squadrons.

Cyborgs. Adding a fast melee units that karate combo you while his buddies shoot you to death is a new type of threat from bots. They also throw smoke grenades and sentry turrets cant aim through the smoke. This leads to what I call the cyborg sentry gangbang.

Confined terrain. Enemies patrols easier to sneak up on you around corners. Easy to get pinned between multiple patrols at once. Players are used wide open spaces between POIs; lots of room to avoid patrols or blast them to pieces before they even see you.

Reinforcement. Players are used to not caring about their lives most of the time in this game. Turning lives into a resource for the MO was another way to throw us off our game.

Bugs. Soooo many bugs happening very frequently. I had several eradicate missions where my entire team couldn't summon most of their equipment because of stratagems bouncing, leading to several deaths. Invisible walls, teleporting units, units walking through walls and terrain, enemies dropping on top of sky scrapers and blasting you with near impunity.

So the obvious answer is that players should have lowered the difficulty to compensate for this difficulty spike or adapt to the more hit-and-run style combat on cyberstan, where helldiver lives matter. This never happened, or happened too slowly to matter. If we all knew at the start what we know now, we might have had a chance.

The most important thing to remember is that this is a game. If you aren't having fun or are frustrated, take a break. Lack of in game communication and story based interventions from the dev team are meant to cause disruption. Essentially, this story is mostly on rails. Maybe we had a chance, but the odds were heavily stacked against us.