I've taught HSC math for the last 12 years, and I am almost certain that the 2020 and 2021 math papers were the easiest papers which have appeared in the past 20 or so years.
I was surprised by how straight forward many of the questions were (especially in the Advanced paper), but we were in COVID19, so I suspect the paper authors took that into consideration and toned everything down.
It does not help that these years coincide with the introduction of the new Adv Math HSC course, because it's hard to tell if the papers for the new ADV math course will permanently be easier or if they were just easier due to COVID19.