Definitively a lot less people in the 20+ areas. If one looks for the planarites for gear, then it is still best to do the 18-20 rifts in Freemarch.
Anyway, I still do like a lot I can hop from doing quests to running rifts to running PvP mini-games to running dungeons to crafting to doing quests. I presume it will get boring eventually, I already noticed once I thought "not again" when a zone wide invasion happened just when I attempted to finish a few quests; then it went over and I joined eagerly the raid to stop the invasion :p
So far I like it very much. The game feels very polished, and the souls system is IMO simply great