Todays the first day that the old version and the NYT versions differ. Apparently NYT removed some words from both the solution and the guess lists.
But any perception that it was harder after the transition is pure nocebo effect.
Edit to add: It’s still all in javascript, so I pulled the js files and compared. There’s 6 possible answers that were removed, and 19 additional valid guess words (that are not possible answers) removed, so I suspect it’s the same algorithm, but at some point they’d diverge due to different lists.
