(I figure I should get my thoughts about this sort of thing out before I forget about who Mario is entirely in four months or so. This may end up as a series, but I promise nothing.)
I recently rewatched hbomberguy's video on Fallout: New Vegas, wherein he discusses choices the player can make and, notably, how different choices lead to actual different gameplay consequences. One such choice is which route you take to New Vegas, a literal fork in the road right at the beginning of the game - you can follow a long, roundabout path across the entire south side of the map, or you can make a beeline for it. Only problem is that the straight shot goes through some of the most hazardous areas in the game, full of some really strong monsters that will destroy you if you're not properly prepared.
This shook some memories loose in my head. I remembered hearing about some difficult second path like this that people would get stuck on, repeatedly ramming their heads against it before eventually giving up and quitting the game entirely - wait, why have I thought about something like this befo
Games often don't have this luxury. The appeal of entire genres comes from giving players control over how they address challenges - if I'm on my twelfth playthrough and want to make enemies of every world superpower just to see what happens, that's my choice, and letting me do that adds some special sauce that no amount of beautiful linear storytelling can match the flavor of.
So since they can't remove the "cheese" because it "makes the game better" and "is core to its identity", how can they address the issue of players who think they just hit a random difficulty spike that they have to force their way through if they want to get to the rest of the game? If it's your twelfth playthrough, sure, fine, you know better but are choosing worse, but what about the poor child out there hitting a Lynel with a tree branch? (Won't somebody think of the children?)
Well, when hard cheese is found in troll levels, sometimes it can't be removed without ruining those either. Sometimes it would complicate a setup that hinges on simplicity, sometimes it garbles the comedic timing, sometimes the troll's entire concept could be compromised. And what we do in these scenarios lines up with how the issue can be resolved in games:
If we can know that the player knows better, then we don't care. If we can reasonably assume that any player taking the difficult path knows that the intended path both exists and is intended, then they're no different from ol' twelfth-time Tim, picking their poison and savoring the flavor of freedom as they get back up and slam headfirst into the "pull" door once more.
And New Vegas executes this beautifully. The entire leadup to that fork is yelling at you to go right, the story is pulling you to the right, and even if you ignore all that and turn left anyways, there are still people saying "hey where do you think you're going? right is over there". The funnel is obvious, and that also leads to a great feeling when you break through the side of the funnel just to prove that you could.
Let players be wrong. Just make sure they know when they are.