Peterson's arguments against Nihilism are substantive and deeply involved with his thesis about individual responsibility. Your description of him is merely hand-waving, uncharitable, and reactionary.
Peterson is a con artist who appeals to desperate and impressionable men that can’t be bothered to read the Nietzsche and Jung that he only skims for sound bites.
That you feel he is a con artist does nothing but indicate to me that all you know of Peterson is from headlines and hit pieces.
On the contrary, he is probably responsible for droves of new readers of Nietzsche, Jung, Solzhenitsyn, Piaget, William James and other important thinkers, which is certainly not a bad thing. Whether you find yourself at odds with what you think his audience is makes no difference to the strength of his arguments.
If you were honestly concerned with challenging Peterson's ideas and fans, you could squarely engage his work critically. Others have productively challenged his ideas and, as a result, have added to the progress of the discussion surrounding them. Before you do that, you're just adding to the noise which confuses and obscures issues of actual importance.
Ah the old "Peterson is a con artist/fraud", aka "I automatically disagree with what he says because he's not a left-wing atheist" or some slight variation of that.
The more people are told to stay away from his work for such intellectually lazy reasons (such that he's inflammatory, offensive, etc, primarily pushed by journalistic hit pieces), the greater the odds of the uninitiated taking a look at his work and finding some value in it. Ironically, the dynamic somewhat resembles your overly religious parents on that damn devil's music.
Note: "finding value in his ideas" does not correspond to agreeing with everything he says. There are many valid critiques of Peterson. It also does not mean that you discard everything he says because you disagree. These strike me as symptoms of lazy ideologically driven thinking, most often political, and particularly speaks volumes of the left vs right divide in America.
It's more telling that you've used your month-old account to drag his name through the mud just as opportunistically as those you accuse.
All you're doing is charging up the topic with more contention than you've found it with. The consequences of doing so are regressive for all related causes, especially your own.
If you find yourself elsewhere in life championing free thought and open discourse, remember this comment and know that you are a hypocrite and an enemy to your own virtues.
> What exactly about his argument that nihilism is "the easy way out" is problematic?
The fact that it is a polemical characterization and not any kind of argument at all would be the main problem I've seen in his attacks on what he calls “nihilism”.
Another problem is that he seems to use the term “nihilist” about as loosely as the average modern North American right-wing propagandist uses the term “Marxist”, so that it becomes very hard to be clear what he is arguing against specifically, which is a real problem because “nihilist” is already a heavily overloaded term that refers to a lot of different and often conflicting belief systems and affiliations.
Another problem is that to the extent that one can frame his stream of polemic as an argument at all, it's mostly one which implicitly relies on existential or moral nihilism (by presenting meaning or morality as something which is not intrinsic, but where is preferred morality is merely an idea that arose at a particular historical time and place that has certain utility to the holder to both hold and to have others around them hold) to argue against whatever it is that Peterson is calling “nihilism”. In this respect, it seems a poor, sloppy, and less honest echo of Nietzsche, who overtly embraced nihilism, but rejected passive nihilism for a more active and, in his view, productive for the individual form of nihilism.