Masahiro Sakurai just released a video where he talks about how if the player quits the game halfway through because a stage is too hard, the end of the game essentially doesn't exist for them and pragmatically discusses that you probably should not box people into unsustainable difficulty curves
(But what about Dark Souls? He addresses soulslikes as an exception that appeals to hardcore gamers where the unreasonable difficulty is the appeal, but shouldn't be taken as a rubric for games as a whole)
And it's killing me that it's so much Not what the weird nerds say about purism