I’ve played a lot of PoE and currently more than most in D4.
I have to say I was expecting the exact opposite reactions in this video.
I was expecting it to be like sad face PoE early levels and gets happier as he levels and then D4 starts happier and gets sadder as it runs out (comparatively) of content.
PoE gets super lightning fast at the end but during the leveling process its pretty slow and boring, everything feels like a waste until you get to level 70 so you skip as much as you can and just try to avoid everything to get through the campaign to the ‘real’ game.
D4, it doesn’t matter where you are in the early game it is worth engaging with that enemy so you don’t skip stuff really. Your build starts to come together fairly quickly and for the duration upto level 70 you are pretty much rocking a build. Then at level 70-75 you get that flip where you got the core paragon nodes you needed and filled up on ancestral gear, you sort of run out of things to chase so now you are just skipping low exp activities trying to get to the reward (basically the feeling of leveling in early PoE).
It’s not universally true for either game but unless you are a solid PoE veteran then its a worse leveling experience IMO. If you die in D4 then you are definitely going to die in PoE and if you die in PoE then you lose 10% of your EXP which makes the leveling way worse generally.