basically we will not be able to judge the performance of the team to compete in the Europa League based on their performance in the domestic League because team that performs well in the domestic League may not necessarily continue to perform well in Europa League competition and vice versa.
Honestly, for Manchester United fans, there are those who are satisfied with Manchester Uniter performance at the beginning of the season with 2 wins but there are also those who say that Manchester United performance is not so satisfying because the players in the two defeats have made several mistakes.
I myself still waiting for how Manchester United will develop later in the Europa League match, if they can complete 8 matches well and qualify from the play-off round then clearly that is good achievement, but if they fail and experience more lots defeats then I will not believe that they will be contender in the title race, after that, trust in Ten Hag performance will also slowly disappear.
If I didn't see wrong, Conference league still has six games though, don't they? While UCL and UEL went to 8 games for groups, conference seems like still six games but I could be wrong. In any case, this is the new format for UEFA and they did this so that teams could make more money, they are going to charge tv rights more and more, and eventually teams will get more and more money thanks to this.
Being at UCL group stages every single year would make any team super rich and would make them get better and better, it's very hard to be there, you have to be one of the best in your league, and for most it also means you need to qualify by beating some teams as well. This is why I think it's clear that we are going to end up with Europa being important path to get better and be at UCL whenever a team gets better.