So I've talked about how I think 'story' difficulty is the better experience in Alan Wake 2, and how I wish Control had an actual designed easy mode the reduced enemy spawns, curtailed some rougher enemy abilities (and so on) rather than the assist mode that was patched in that lets you mess with combat parameters.
And like, I will often say that the combat challenge is just not the point with these games, and I think this begs the question of "okay but isn't having combat then superfluous and therefore a flaw?"
And... no, actually. These games do need the combat to be there, the combat is just poorly tuned in Control (and on Normal difficulty in Alan Wake 2). Just because combat challenge isn't the point doesn't mean that the combat doesn't have a purpose.
These games would just be fundamentally different in tone if they were pure adventure games with no combat. To get a certain mood or tone you just ultimately need the world to be able to push back on the player; you need some push and pull where the game world isn't just a passive object that the player acts upon. Just like how a horror story needs to put its characters in jeopardy. 'Mechanical jeopardy' in a game is a fundamental storytelling tool. Not every game needs it, of course, but some do.
It doesn't have to be combat, either; Amnesia uses pure stealth, for example. Combat is just widely understood by both players and designers and it typically makes sense in the milieu of, say, a horror story.
But I think that very often this kind of friction ends up tuned to a point of frustration that drives players to want to turn it off (see SOMA); or there's some misidentification of whether it actually is necessary. And I think that these kinds of games are ones that really do benefit from a general difficulty slider that bring the combat challenge down. Because I think a lot of the time the best experience is one where combat is there to push back on the player but not really knock you over.
Also definitely difficulty sliders like this should affect the number and type of enemy spawns and not just change combat parameters like damage, thank you for coming to my GDC talk.