Building encounters for D&D is not fun (for me)

This post is certainly not intended to make people angry or start some sort of online war.

I will go out of my way to say that I'm not a "strict" DM by any means and I have in the past found D&D a bit restrictive both as a player and a DM so I tend to run games loosely. Right now I'm running a game for 4 players using 2024 rules and they are currently all level 4.

The players are just about to open a tomb which has a warning on it about it containing a "warrior" which is basically me hinting that there is an encounter in the tomb. I want the encounter to be challenging because the tomb holds a vital piece of information to the story The last encounter I built for them was according to the builder "deadly" but they cleared it with ease.

I find the whole challenge rating thing incredibly confusing, even more so because we are not using XP. Any encounter builder that I have used has said "this might TPK the party" and it just does not have that effect. I'm not trying to TPK the party, but I do want them to feel challenged and feel potential danger. It's incredibly frustrating and something I really dislike about D&D.

Rant over.... Advice welcome

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