Right. I don’t mean every challenge and difficulty is purposeless and dumb, just that those don’t have to be the goal, and that sometimes an easy game is what you want.

Tangentially, I have noticed some of the most well-balanced difficult games I have ever played were the ones with very granular difficulty settings. Examples include CrossCode and Celeste. Crypt of the Necrodancer too, though the customisation there feels like it crosses into too granular. In each I changed the difficulty settings exactly once, for optional challenges, and it made the games way more enjoyable.