I had an experience similar to you, OP. I came back from a pre-2.1 hiatus about a month ago, and found everything had changed. My Vulture had gone from a reliable CZ and RES hunter to an accident waiting to happen. I'd go into a bounty hunting area and... everything was scary. I would go up against a group of small ships that in the past I'd have taken down trivially and maybe kill one, but then my shields would be shredded and I'd be running again, jinking and hoping my FSD would finish turning back on before a missile wrecked my thrusters. I also found that NPC interdictions were genuinely dangerous, rather than almost ignorable as they were in 2.0. It was humbling and frustrating. It's not easy to stop feeling like a predator and start feeling like prey.
In the short term, the key for me was to accept my limitations and recalibrate my expectations of what I could safely do. I avoided combat situations where I could get easily outnumbered. I sacrificed jump range and cargo capacity on my mining and trade ships (Python and Clipper) in exchange for heavier shields and boosters. Even in 2.0 I felt the T-series of trade ships were flying coffins, so I didn't even have to try to avoid those in 2.1.
I also started spending some time working on engineering my ships, seeing as everyone was saying that that was the way forward. I gave up on the Vulture; I wasn't far off FdL money so I figured it would be better to skip spending significant time on the Vulture and build my target endgame ship instead. I got a list of rare and very rare materials and checked every mission board for missions offering them as a reward (if you can get Pharmaceutical Isolators as a reward for carrying some data 30ly, then you don't need to hunt for them when you need them). I built up supplies and worked on unlocking the various engineers... and the game got easier. Even some of the low-mid level engineering mods offer big performance improvements, particularly to shields, thrusters and weapons. Once I got to the high-end mods, the ship I produced was pretty spectacular. The FdL I have built feels like a force of nature; NPCs just seem to melt before it. I've also played the game a whole lot with the new patch and spent some time CQC-ing, neither of which can have hurt my piloting skills.
I guess you could read this as 'I got gud and you should to'. But that's not what I'm going for here. I still wouldn't claim to be a great pilot, I just have a better ship. The engineering system is designed to reward you for sampling bits of the game you might not have touched before. Base-scanning for Modified Embedded Firmware was a lot of fun, and I probably wouldn't have tried it if the engineers hadn't prodded me towards it. People complain it's a grind, and a few bits are (*Cough cough Palin and his stupid 25 Unknown Fragments cough cough*), but the rewards are significant even if you don't go all the way to level 5 upgraded everything.
I hope you come back, OP. It's a tougher galaxy and you'll need to adapt, but that can be fun and there's lots of interesting things to do.
