Nothing disingenuous about it. People dogpile on easy games and on motion blur and the like, rejecting developers vision but when it comes to asking for easy mode suddenly said vision is important. Lol. It's pure hypocrisy and there's nothing beyond it.
I've literally never seen anyone dogpile an easy mode.
The only time the suggestion for easy modes isn't taken well is with FROM games, and on that specific experience, an out-of-game toggle doesn't make sense (But ingame tools still work! Das1\2 had plenty of ways to pick your own difficulty without breaking immersion, from not using parry-based builds, to summons, to whatnot)
The point i'm trying to get through you is that difficulty is not a single slider.
Strategy checks, farm checks, information checks, coordination checks, timing checks, muscle memory checks and so many others test different skills, and there's plenty of ways to direct a player to a fun playstyle without relying on crude tools such as menu options.
Separately, if given the option, players will optimize the fun out of the game.
This is much less of an issue for "short" narrative games, and much more of an issue for GaaS, but it still exists - we call it
degenerate gameplay, and the mere existance of it can often ruin the experience (for example, an 'overpowered' weapon available in the wrong moment of the game can literally delete vast swathes of gameplay by having a player over-rely on it)
A blunt example that may get through:
Let's say this is a Soulslike, that is, a game about mastery.
We're in area 6, and the planned design has 10 unavoidable monsters on the way, all of which have 1000hp.
The player has, in the toolbox, a weapon that is usable long-range, before-aggro, and deals 200 damage. 8 usages per area.
This weapon can be upgraded to 400 if the player specializes in it.
This isn't a timing check, this is a spatial reasoning check to reward scouting, patience, and planning.
It's a good design, and it works - players find it fun, rewarding, and as it's an optional mechanic - trading time for performance - even a mechanic that allows the player to choose what kind of difficulty is wanted.
Enter blunt difficulty scaling!
You have enabled Easy Mode. The monsters are now 6 per area, and have 400hp.
The entire area is deletable using only said weapon, with trivial difficulty. There's no gameplay left, the zone is trivial and boring, and it has absolutely none of the intended gameplay flow - it's just meh.
This is obviously a blunt example, but the reality of what we call tuning is entirely like this - the numbers are what they are for a reason, and fiddling with them to provide a proper experience is a full feature in it's own rights and absolutely not a trivial undertaking
This is not a theoretical exercise.
During the sixth gen, most bigshot titles went all in with blunt difficulty scaling, and the result was a EXTREMELY suboptimal combat experience on all modes except the default - and even that, getting less tuning attention than usual, was often unsatisfactory
Obviously, combat and challenge is not the first pillar of all these games, but the reality is that what used to be the nigh entirety of gaming up to gen 4 was now an underserved market, a market that was served again on the coattails of Souls' success.
Now, is your game a game about Narrative, a game about Exploration, a game about Relaxation, a game about literally anything else except Mastery?
Go ahead. Providing, if nothing else, a Story \ Relaxing mode with substantial invincibility has literally no downsides, and i fully support doing that.
Is your game mostly about mastery? Tread lightly. Invest heavily in tuning for multiple modes, or don't at all. In-game tools are preferable to Out-game tools.
Is your game fully about mastery, and narratively and atmospherically about death, loss and challenge? Blunt scalings aren't going to cut it, and providing a Story mode that's not extremely clearly labelled \ hidden can, with one button tap, delete the entirety of your game.
This isn't about gatekeeping, or bragging rights, or whatever.
I'm just trying to explain that difficulty and challenge are major tools in a game designer's toolbox, and they require work, effort, planning and compromise to deploy effectively - both for pure gameplay goals and for narrative goals.
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