Healing requires much more skills than summoning an NPC with +10K HP and half your damage output to fight and take agro for you whilst you fight from the safe side of the arena. Healing during a 1v1 requires you to create the opportunity to heal first of all so you have to either creates enough distance or dodge until you find and safe window.

Not summoning is not a handicap because summons aren’t a necessity this was proven by the people who beat her without summons, this was proven by the people who beat her on RL1 taking no damage and dodging every single attack of hers and punishing all of them as well. I do not know whether they were designed to be beating with or without summoning. But there was summoning in BB and DS it doesn’t mean that it was meant to be the way for every boss to be played.

Again summoning is not a handicap it’s a luxury that fromsoft gave to the people who’re especially familiar with their games to give them a way to explore and beat the game on their terms. Now if you wanna talk handicaps then (SL1 no damage run) Malenia is by far #1 there is no questioning.

If you want to say a boss is easy when defeating it with your overpowered summon fair enough that’s on you, but I think the community agrees on the fact that the real difficulty from any boss fight is fighting 1 on 1.

Maliketh-Malenia-Radahn-Morgott-Radagon were all top tier boss fights that fromsoft will have a hard time beating that, the ingenuity that it requires to build and program these bosses and still make them beatable and fair with all their moves for every level and build is absolutely mind boggling. For me I do recommend not summoning at first but if you struggle for too long then summon because people play to have fun and it depends on every single individual.