it seems inevitable in retrospect that dark souls 2's critical re-evaluation as an excellent action-RPG in its own right would lead to a similar re-evaluation of the differences between the original release and scholar of the first sin. back when i first beat vanilla DS2 with the DLC, i remember thinking of it as the fromsoft game that made me the least mad
my first playthrough of scholar was full of bad memories, capped off by losing my progress to a hard drive failure halfway through, so it took a long time for me to actually do a full playthrough without any mods. even after replaying every souls game and elden ring, my experience didn't really smooth over the added difficulty, but i still ended up beating both the initial and new game +1 runs, so i was surprised to go back to vanilla after all this time and suddenly get my ass kicked
scholar does bump up enemy density and detection, but the massed enemies get in each others' way, and they actually attack less frequently than in the base version. scholar has a lot of gotcha enemy placements, but it's easy to forget that some of those traps were there from the beginning (and equally dangerous despite the lower enemy count)
unsurprisingly, i think the people making the argument that scholar is actually easier are simply more used to the new arrangements, because years of playing and watching scholar has made me worse at what i used to consider the least-frustrating fromsoft souls experience. it's actually made me appreciate the changes scholar made more, though i still think vanilla's the better experience for a first-timer. scholar still greatly benefits from a small but passionate mod scene- the fanmade lighting engine is wildly impressive all on its own, while seeker of fire matured from sensible scholar fixes to being a truly new experience
so yes, either version of dark souls 2 is one of the greatest action-RPGs i've ever played, which occasionally makes a detour into being one of the worst video games i've ever played, despite the existence of better ideas in their other titles and post-launch updates with which to implement them
in other words, a true from software souls game