There's a really common pattern of miscommunication about writing:
Reader: "The stakes weren't high enough for me"
Writer: "The villain is literally trying to end the multiverse how much higher do you need the stakes to go?"

When a reader complains that the stakes aren't high enough, they're usually complaining that the central conflict doesn't matter to them.

This has to do with emotional investment, not with fictional scale.

It doesn't matter how "big" it is on the fictional scale; a fictional multiverse matters not at all if we don't care about it; a grocery list might matter a great deal. The "size" of the conflict is about the emotions it evokes in the reader.

From the writer's side, the emphasis is often incorrectly on changing the fictional events (the "stakes" or potential outcomes to the conflict), rather than the way that we present and frame those fictional events (creating investment in the outcome, however large or small).

There _can_ be a problem where the stakes of a conflict are not clearly defined, which blocks the reader caring about it because they can't connect to what they don't understand.

(Ex. Okay your heroine is fighting the Wicked King, but why does that matter to us? What would it mean if she won? The kingdom seems fine, honestly.)

But 95% of the time a "stakes" problem doesn't mean you have to change the stakes of the story's conflict.

It is often about creating interest and emotional investment in the outcomes that already exist. Without emotional investment, any conflict is boring.

Anyway, I've seen this miscommunication many times in feedback (both editorial and critique group) and it's _so_ often unproductive. I thought I would say something.