I remember pre-2.0 pyblock being surprisingly reasonable in terms of difficulty. It used to be tough, but fair.
Now I can't get past the early game because just to start automating belt production I need an ungodly number of fawage farms (we're talking hundreds of them to build 1 belt per second) and that infrastructure itself requires so many belts that it stops making sense.
The iron situation is really tough but at least I see the light at the end of the tunnel. The copper situation is just borderline unmanageable: the soot route is extremely inefficient, everything else is blocked by building even more infrastructure that, you guessed it, requires more copper (for inserters).
I don't remember exactly what I did early game pre-2.0, but I don't remember it being anywhere this wild.