I can give an example. I'd heard that Super Meat Boy was hard, and it was, but it turned out, if you ran it at the 60hz it was designed for instead of 75hz, it was considerably easier. At 120hz it was unplayable.

You kind of understand how the game loop is tied to the refresh rate in games like this, though. Practicing "pixel perfect" jumps must be challenging if the engine updates aren't necessarily in sync with what goes on on screen. And in the really old days (when platformers were invented!) there was no real alternative to having the engine in sync with the screen.

In the model I am describing there would be whole game state updates on every tick cycle, completely decoupling the frame rate from the response latency and prediction steps.