Yeah, Nioh 2 felt waaaaay less “bullshit” to me than any of the Dark Souls games.
It’s a hard game but you have more tools/approaches than you do in Dark Souls. It’s less about memorizing patterns, although understanding how different bosses/monsters attack is going to be a huge help. It just felt a little less focused on that exclusively.
I found the initial part of the game quite hard. The first two bosses really took me a while to down. Then there was a breakthrough moment as I got accustomed to the game and acquired more tools in the game where it became a fair amount easier than Dark Souls. It would oscillate a bit but overall I found it not as hard as the Dark Souls games. Still quite challenging, but with the Diablo-ness of the systems you can kind of outlevel/outpower content that you struggle with to some degree.