Here are some tips that I found helped me with the difficulty spike:
Even if the surface is not climable, you can purposefully come just short of the jump and your picks will pull you up
When landing and you don't want to slide, quickly hit shift/walk as you land and your sliding distance will be decreased by a lot. For the red crystals and the hexagon pipes this trick is really useful.
For the sliding, you have to jump a little bit further up the pipe than you want to so you can slide a bit and keep the momentum.