Talk about a 180 haha.Lol. I got that impression because the game gives you so many free heals when you're on the routes between towns, and it guides you everywhere. But of course, gym battles aren't affected by this and if you're underlevelled the game will be quite hard too. However if you do any amount of raid battles in the wild area you get showered in exp.
They did kind of account for this, there seems to be much fewer trainers to battle in this game. So if you ignored the wild area and just went through routes fighting only trainers, like in the past games, you will be under-levelled. But you can "grind" the wild area raids and get yourself overlevelled way easier than any other pokemon game.
Overall I think they got this spot on. If you want a harder game then leave the wild area until after you've finished the story, and that makes sense anyway since the wild area is more about grinding the best moves for competitive play, completing the dex, endgame online battles etc.
(of course, its still easier than anything gen V or earlier, unless you try to do the absolute minimum possible battles)