Just like Hollywood and news broadcast, Brazilian soap operas have created the de facto Portuguese accent for non-Portuguese speakers.
I've never heard an Italian or Spanish person say they can't understand anything in a spoken Portuguese conversation.
Developing economy, speaking with a strong Slavic accent, recovering after a long dictatorship, you check many boxes :-p
I worked with someone from Romania. He said Portuguese sounds just like Romanian until you try to understand it, then it sounds like someone making fun of Romanian.
It's very very varied phonetically when compared to the neighboring Spanish, which IIRC underwent considerable simplification at in the 16th century with unification of Spain.
I've heard many French and Spanish native speakers expressing the difficulty to understand it.
Source: Portuguese native speaker with decades-long immersion in Spanish and French-speaking communities.
Pt-Pt drops a lot of unstressed vowels whereas Br-Pt almost all syllables are pronounced.
Langfocus did a video on why (European) Português sounds like Russian.
Mentioning this because the term is not widely known in the U.S., at least in my circles.
https://www.bl.uk/british-accents-and-dialects/articles/rece...
Of all the approximates people use for "the", the soft Latin "d" is quite close to the original, compared to, say, the Franco-German "ze"! Even here in Finland, we are quite fluent in English as such but many completely disregard the difference brought by the "h" in both phonemes, and just aspirate the "t" like you would do without the "h" (and then pronounce the other t's softly without aspiration at all!).
It's all comprehensible as long as its regular, I guess. Still, as an elementary Spanish speaker, I still often get distracted by the Brazilian r's, since instead of "r", I hear the Spanish "jota" or otherwise something I would describe as in the range of h-like sounds, not r's.
I've heard people calling this way to speak "fala de apresentador da Globo": which means "Globo's presenter way of speech"; Globo is Brazil's most popular TV network and its presenters have a clear way to speak that sounds very neutral and free from accents from one region or another.
I lived in Rondônia during the 90's. It was a very recent state and, at the time, people from all over the country went to live there to make good use of the new opportunities offered by a recent new state. So, the people living there were mostly from other places and there was a mix of accents which made it basically accent-free.
All forms of pronouncing "r" are very easy to me. And, to help people understand what I say and because I lived among very different accents, I speak in a very "neutral" way. People have once said I have a "fala de apresentador da Globo". But this way of speech is not uncommon in most developed regions neither among people who have to talk to people of different parts of the country.
Result of this: Brazilians can speak most of the romance languages and even other less phoneme rich languages from Asia or Europe without much difficulty. We even make fun of hispanophonic latin-americans because they can't say "cair no poço não posso".