Nobody disputes that the gear grind is longer at all levels, but many of you are overreacting to this. I can tell you that even high-end raiders and M+ are not happy with the changes for different reasons. I think the thing we can all agree on is that these first few weeks are going to be rough at all levels.
Like I said, later in the season, you will still have high ilvl players running 9s and 10s and be willing to bring in lower ilvl players. The raid will also become more accessible to progress with the strands buff which is superimpactful since pretty much all the bosses can be overcome with pure throughput and will become easily farmed more and more as the weeks go on. It will ease out but certainly I do not deny that these changes have really made the first quarter/third of this season a slog at every gameplay level.