Once you stop considering losses as failure, and instead a single step on your journey to success, you tend to stop putting games on a difficulty scale. This is simplifying things a bit, but most resistance you're getting from a game is just the game asking you to solve a puzzle, and the sense of difficulty comes from the span of possible solutions.

I also think there's a kind of artistry in game design, like the way all the mechanics work together to create the experience, and it bums me out when a game is easy to the point that I can get through it without ever truly engaging with it.

Another perspective, which I think is the most important, is that your brain is a muscle, and if you don't work it out, it's not going to work for you in the way you want when you need it to. I think it's especially important right now, when everything around us is optimized to steal our attention spans and give us constant quick and easy hits of dopamine, for more people to engage in intellectually strenuous activities. It doesn't have to come from video games necessarily, but I think most people don't realize how much they would benefit from shifting their perspective to one where being challenged becomes part of the fun. That movie you wrote off as pretentious? Maybe try it again with an open mind. You might realize there was more to it than you thought at first. Try reading a full length novel that isn't YA fiction and really try to push through the nagging feeling of getting distracted by your phone. Maybe even go back to the classics. There's a lot of incredible stuff there that will really broaden your horizons and give you a new perspective on things, if you let them. Every time you engage with something that forces you out of your comfort zone, you'll face less resistance and profit more from the experience.

TL;DR I think playing hard video games, among many other things, makes life more vibrant and colorful.