From my understanding, the 万葉集 is written in 万葉仮名 which uses a limited set of
characters solely for their 音読み reading rather than for their semantic
meaning.

In light of this, I am curious how difficult it is for a Native Japanese
speaker to be able to read the 万葉集.

From the recent announcement of the Reiwa era being taken from the following
passage:

初春令月、氣淑風和、梅披鏡前之粉、蘭薫珮後之香

I saw that it was also presented in modern Japanese as

初春の令月にして、気淑く風和ぎ、梅は鏡前の粉を披き、蘭は珮後の香を薫らす。

Is the latter a large jump to the former for someone with a typical University
level education that doesn't focus on literature such as this?

I was told by an acquaintance that a typical mainland Chinese person would be
able to trivially read this passage of the 万葉集. Is this true? I have my doubts
for the aforementioned reasons: I believe it uses the characters for their 音読み
and should in principle not make sense when read without a Japanese vocabulary
and I would expect that any language would have evolved from AD 759 so
significantly that it should be difficult to read by anyone. That leads me to
doubt that this cannot possibly be "trivial" for a Chinese person to be able
to read.

Nevertheless, I am having a great deal of difficulty finding reasonable
sources that support or deny the claim.
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kanji old-japanese manyōgana kanbun
How difficult is the 万葉集 to read?
As others have noted, there are multiple parts to the _Man'yōshū_.

  * The commentary, prefaces, and various other bits of text were written in a version of Classical Chinese, known as [漢文]{kanbun}, and either read as-is using the on'yomi values in a style known as [音読]{ondoku} (literally "sound reading", using the sound values borrowed from Chinese), or interpreted into almost-Japanese in a style called [訓読]{kundoku} (literally "meaning reading", using the native-Japanese words that correlated to the meanings of the kanji and supplying the unwritten particles). 
    * The _kanbun_ portions of the text are basically Classical Chinese, so any well-educated Chinese reader would presumably be able to read and understand _kanbun_.
    * The era name [令和]{Reiwa} comes from the _kanbun_ preface for _Man'yōshū_ poems 815 through 846, as visible [here](http://jti.lib.virginia.edu/japanese/manyoshu/Man5Yos.html#815) in the smaller text just below the poem number.
    * Your first line of sample text is _kanbun_ : 

> 初春令月、氣淑風和、梅披鏡前之粉、蘭薫珮後之香

    * Your second line of sample text is the _kanbun_ reinterpreted into Japanese in a fashion similar to _kundoku_. Notice the particles have appeared, and the kanji are repositioned in a few places to better match Japanese grammar. 

> 初春の令月にして、気淑く風和ぎ、梅は鏡前の粉を披き、蘭は珮後の香を薫らす。

  * The poems are written in the Japanese of the time using a combination of kanji used for their sound values (the _man'yōgana_ , where [仮名]{kana} literally means "borrowed character", as they were borrowed for their sounds) and kanji used for their meanings. 
    * Different poems were written at different times by different writers. Some poems are entirely in phonetic _man'yōgana_ , and others are in a mixture of phonetic _man'yōgana_ and semantic kanji used for their meaning. Here's the start of [poem 2](http://jti.lib.virginia.edu/japanese/manyoshu/Man1Yos.html#2), for instance, showing a mix (I've modernized the romanization somewhat): 

> [原文] 山常庭 村山有等 取與呂布 天乃香具山 騰立  
>  [訓読] 大和には 群山あれど とりよろふ 天の香具山 登り立ち  
>  [Rom] Yamato ni wa mura-yama aredo tori-yorou Ama-no-kagu Yama nobori-tachi

There are two big challenges in reading the poetry of the _Man'yōshū_.

  1. Simply having all the kanji in one's head. The number of ways you could spell し, for instance:  
子之芝水四司詞斯志思信偲寺侍時歌詩師紫新旨指次此死事准磯為  
And that list may not even be exhaustive. (See also [the Wikipedia article on
_man'yōgana_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man%27y%C5%8Dgana#Types) for more
detail.)

  2. Figuring out when a given kanji is being used phonetically (for its reading), and when it's being used semantically (for its meaning). For instance, 波 is used in many poems (such as [poem 793](http://jti.lib.virginia.edu/japanese/manyoshu/Man5Yos.html#793)) for its _on'yomi_ of _ha_ (in Old Japanese, probably _pa_ ), for which it is used as a stand-in for the topic particle は. But in other places (such as [poem 1068](http://jti.lib.virginia.edu/japanese/manyoshu/Man7Yos.html#1068)), it's used for its meaning "wave", when it's read as _nami_ instead.

So take from all that what you will. My own take on _"How difficult is the 万葉集
to read?"_ is "very difficult, and not something for beginners."

**Additional note:**

The above describes how to simply work out the sound values. Add in the
significant wrinkle that the _Man'yōshū_ poems were written no later than
around 759, some of them possibly centuries earlier, and you also have to
factor in changes in grammar and vocabulary since the Old Japanese (OJP) of
that era. For instance, が and つ are more commonly used as possessive particles
in OJP than the modern の, while modern object particle を was used more as an
emphatic, or as a sentence-ending particle to show admiration. Meanwhile, the
passive ending was ゆ rather than られる, and modern causative suffix す was
instead an honorific. This linguistic drift is a large part of the reason why
[古文]{kobun} or "old language" dictionaries exist, explaining the ancient
language to modern readers of Japanese. One such example is available online
via [Weblio](https://kobun.weblio.jp/).
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