I think it's around the same difficulty if you ask me. I managed to beat the first game with only 15 deaths once (three of which involved dying from falls). This was as my fourth character which was a cleric build (so I had good defense, ATK and healing/regenerating miracles not to mention that at this point, I obviously knew what to expect and I was more cautious deliberately on this playthrough).
I never understood that "thousands of deaths" statement. In my first playthroughs for both Dark Souls games, I only died around 70 times. I can only see a person literally dying hundreds of times if they're really really bad at the game or they've been playing PvP a lot (in which case you will die hundreds of times as well kill hundreds of other players). Concerning that, I rose to the top of the Forest Hunter covenant twice in the first game (which requires 80 kills) and I killed a fair amount of other players in the Oolacille arena, Oolacille township and co-op, so I think I have around 250 player kills for my PvP character and probably over 400-500 deaths in PvP as him (although I haven't played any Souls PvP since last year, I think it's overrated and got bored of it after a few months).
Anyways, all I know is, is that with any Souls game, your character build determines the difficulty. When I played the Artorias expansion for the first time, I made a new character who ended up being a terrible build and I died so many times as them, even throughout the vanilla game. I make another new character for the expansion, ensure their build is good and suddenly there is no enemy that stands a chance against me again.