I've been playing Spelunky 2 a lot, and I don't think it's as nicely balanced as the original.
It errs on the side of being too difficult - I've finished it, so this isn't a "git gud" situation - and also has a lot of periods of waiting very early on in the game which make repeated plays tedious. There's a bunch of tanky, fast, randomly-moving enemies in the first area that are just very poorly thought-out, as they cause everything to grind to a halt. The other big strike is that health is essentially meaningless. You aren't going to die from gradually losing your health points - you're going to die as one of the lots and lots of instant kill mechanisms gets you.
Dying in Spelunky wasn't so bad. You laughed at some Spelunky-flavoured nonsense, and then you jump in again. But it takes over 10 minutes just to get through the first area (if you don't die, which is far from a given), which makes repeating incredibly tedious, and death therefore stops being fun. It's still a good game, just not as good as the original.