I had background in data science insofar as I had taken a statistics course, learned quite a bit about machine learning, and just generally done a lot of CS (but I had barely done any data viz/database querying/applied statistics). For people with only cursory experience with CS, the need to learn a bunch of new languages and tools (R, Python (+pandas/scikit-learn), MongoDB, SQL, maybe more) will probably make the content much less easy.

The courses did not push me to work that hard - all of them had just one deadline which was the project submission, and there were usually 2-3 months between deadlines and I got away with only seriously working on it the last 3-4 weeks most of the time. That being said, the projects were of good quality - pretty substantial, with good rubrics, and good ability to choose from easy options or do your own things. And, once again my extensive background in CS and ML probably made things easier than it would be for many people.

To be clear, I did not mind the courses not being that deep since I did not really want to be really busy with courses while working full time. I just think if these are for getting into being a professional in the field, they are not quite as deep as I might like for that.