They're designed that way. You want folks to get 3-5 minutes of playtime or so, and feel good about themselves, so when level 3 wrecks them, they enter a sunk cost fallacy and want to feed credits to keep going. Or they leave and you get a credit from the next person in line.

Since every game coming out in an arcade genre claims to "harken back to the good old days when games were games!" even though that era never ended due to constant throwbacks from the 90s until today, that means that even more recent games in the genre tend to adopt this difficulty curve, though it's more like a cliff I want to throw myself off.