There is some truth to it. If you look at the patches that came after the breach they brought power creep with them. And currently Path of the Unspoken the highest difficulty is undertuned.
After this some much needed adjustments were made to bring down player power.
And there were complaints that you couldn’t 1 shot bosses anymore etc. I have even come across players who complained that the hardest difficulty was too hard, and they refused to lower the difficulty.
I don’t think there is a massive amount of requests like that, but there is some at least.
Back in the end of 2025 there was a post regarding kinda the same concerns (which I know see was made by you actually 
):
And we did get a response from Thomas on this:
So I really hope they still working towards this vision. Because if they are going trying to appeal for the largest amount of players, it will turn into PoE1/PoE2 lite which would be very sad.