I think in every year students tend to think their exam was the hardest year - often they don't end up being the case.
My personal hypothesis is that the graded distribution will be similar to 2019 - in terms of actual difficulty I don't think this year is any harder than 2019, i'd actually say it's reasonably easier from an exam difficulty perspective, than 2019.
As someone who taught Spec for 9 years (no longer in teaching), I agree with the sentiment that it wasn't necessarily harder than some exams from previous years.
Having said that, my initial thoughts were that it would have been incredibly challenging to complete within the prescribed time frame under exam conditions.
In order to nail it, I think you would have had to have found the most efficient solution to each question straight away.
In the comfort of my own home (with the distractions of children), within two hours of writing time, I managed to answer all of the extended response (with the exception of a few parts I'd asterisked to come back to - mostly due to working errors on my behalf), but only half of the MCQ. It took probably another hour to go back and fix my earlier mistakes and finish the remaining multiple choice.
Admittedly, I didn't answer everything super efficiently, but in the heat of the exam, I don't know how students are supposed to do o either.