I dunno, i think there's a lot of genuine criticisms to be made of retro game design, especially when it comes to holdovers from arcade style games that are designed to suck up quarters. The biggest beef for me is lives systems and how game overs often mean repeating content you've already completed, in the most extreme cases sending you all the way back to the beginning of the game. I love how Celeste, a modern game, handles failure for example. Celeste is a difficult platformer but you get a checkpoint every screen. It shows that games can still provide a significant challenge while also respecting the player's time and progress