It's almost impossible for those of us who have played the same encounters over and over again to give an objective view on the difficulty. I guess if you didn't min-max at all and just tried to pretend you were a complete new player who didn't know anything about d&d, that might give a better idea of what the game is like to new players. I might have to try that lol. i can't imagine it would be pleasant.
Yes, you can't really go back to experiencing it as it would be like fresh, but you can have a comparative view on difficulty against your previous attempts at an encounter. Like for instance: Zhalk is easier now with shadowheart compared to patch 4, or the tutorial is easier because imps no longer have resistance compared to patch 4. I think we know that plenty of people in their first attempts find encounters in the game tough from the many posts about it on release of EA.
Personally, I'm mostly wondering if any of the changes have made things harder in general - for instance due overall lower to hit chances with the removal of the leapfrog game, and enemies using dash and more using shove (afaik this used to only be the Gnolls)
For EA and playing around with these things it is quite useful that "examine" allows looking at stats - though I would prefer the kingmaker style DC checks to access this info for a finial release
