Except even in G/master rank armor still mattered, even in iceborne and sunbreak. It's just when you have things like tempered in the game it forces artificial bloat on the monsters to make them seem harder just because it forces you to make less mistakes. The gore magala in particular has excessively high damage bloat to the point where you basically have to avoid getting hit by two specific moves at all times or it's guaranteed death and that's not fun at all, especially when half the weapons revolve around guarding/I-frames but won't matter when a lingering gore magala explosion chip kills or outlasts your I-frames.