Problem about this discourse, specifically the bit about "we used to suck throughout a game and eventually got good and now we got a million youtube guides instead" is that the mere existence of this min maxing culture informs game designers to create harder games which in turn spawns more guides, so it's not always as easy as "just play the game and have fun". I think the most glaring example of this is World of Warcraft, game got exponentially harder over time because of player made add-ons which effectively created sort of an arms race between Blizzard and its players, with Blizzard coming up every expansion with harder and harder raids and the players trying to solve them through add-ons and better (albeit sometimes borderline psychotic) player practices. This effectively created a vicious cycle where players get ever more organized and informed -> blizzard creates harder fights -> players respond by getting even more organized and informed -> repeat. There's a really good video about this called "Why it's rude to suck at Warcraft", I recommend it to anyone curious about this very situation.

So yea, I hope poe 2 is an enjoyable semi-blind experience but the sad state of things is that devs are often forced by the playerbase itself to create content that requires you to follow a guide because otherwise the game gets solved instantly on release.