Not sure what that was in regard to (Hellblade, maybe?) but I typically find games more entertaining and rewarding on harder difficulties because they require you to use more of what's offered. But it also really helps if the game itself is already enjoyable to play. if a game doesn't play well raising the difficulty isn't going to help things.
I don't mind lowering the difficulty if I just want to rush through something or if I'm simply not having as much fun on a harder difficulty I'll try lowering it to see if that improves my experience.
That's funny, my experience is the exact opposite. I remember getting frustrated with my replays in action games on the hardest difficulties because there are so many of your abilities and tools you straight up
can't use, or you will die or lose resources. I play on normal/easy now just so I can play with the abilities or weapons that I want to instead of what the game dictates. The early God of War games were the most obvious examples of this I can think of, where you literally wanted to not unlock special moves so you don't accidentally use them in combat.
No one would give a shit about their games if they were easy. The entire appeal of Souls games is that you can go from being on top of the world to being dead in a second. Every enemy is a threat. The world is designed to kill you. Staying alive is rewarding and dying carries consequences.
If people can't handle the difficulty and difficulty spikes then they should just watch a lets play on youtube. People spend way too much time crying about this stuff on the internet. Get good and beat the game. Or cheese/cheat your way through them. Or just move on with your life by playing anything else. There are actual people who love this genre and are passionate about the design/experience of these games. Let them enjoy it. No need to piss all over a directors vision because something is inaccessible to you.
This is, frankly, disgusting elitism, a bit delusional, and shows a lack of empathy or understanding. No one (beyond a few people like you, I guess) regards games that have difficulty settings as worse. Saying people "wouldn't care" is like saying people shouldn't care about Minecraft, or any of the Final Fantasy games, or Celeste, or Hollow Knight, or Super Mario, or.... fucking almost the entire library of modern games. Games are as popular as ever and as shared as they are and as polished as they've become because of how many people have access to them. I've played and beaten some of the "hardest" games on consoles and PC and some (old) ones didn't have difficulty settings and they would not be worse if they did.
The
only things that should
ever be gatekeepered are things where it would actively harm other people to not restrict access. Driving, owning a gun, being an educator, etc. all are things that deserve to have some actual limit on access. There is no legitimate reason to not accept difficulty options in games, or making them available for more people to enjoy. That's not to say I think difficulty options should be a #1 priority for devs but ignoring them entirely, in action games in particular, will only hurt in the long run.
If you think a game is just a worse piece of work because it has more options, that's honestly on you.
Edit: Closest comparison I can think of having personally is Rick & Morty. I like R&M a LOT, but I don't talk about it with hardly anyone because the majority of the fanbase seems to like different things about it than I do. That sucks for me trying to share my own passion of it, but I don't begrudge those people for enjoying something differently.