As of last Friday, there are 10.952 Jr. Members (that therefore required receiving at least 1 sMerit). It’s true though that if I narrow down on those whose account was created in 2019, the toll goes down to 476 Jr Members, which isn’t a large amount for 2019 created accounts.
(see https://public.tableau.com/shared/23435KRGF?:display_count=yes&:origin=viz_share_link)

On the other hand, I do believe that getting that one merit is a piece of cake if one applies himself to the task. It may take a month or two of perseverance (as was my case), but that is probably it.

If one wants to keep up the pace with the time required to rank-up as it did before the Merit System, you’ll need to gain a rough average of one merit per day (and that's when @DireWolfM14’s calculator comes in handy). That is pretty tough to achieve nowadays, but 1 Merit .. not really.