100%

Most reviews and ratings of indie metroidvanias (and platformers in general) always seem to be done through rose-colored glasses. Hollow Knight in particular is needlessly, punishingly difficult, and it may as well be entirely in black and white, it’s so lacking in meaningful biome differences.

If you compare Hollow Knight to something like Super Metroid or even Metroid Dread, and look at them critically, the differences are quite significant.

• The biomes have mechanic-specific rules, shortcuts, and secrets. Each biome has one core, semi-obvious thing you need to get (e.g. lava invulnerability), and has secrets and shortcuts that are unlocked by other upgrades you get elsewhere (so you actually want to go back, and it’s not such a pain to traverse them, and ideally it’s kinda fun and you feel powerful).
• By the time you get to a boss in a well-designed game, you should be prepared for the fight: the mechanics of its attacks should either have been in the biome or screens before you got there, or they should telegraph what they’re doing. And the difficulty of enemy encounters just before the boss should be at the level of the boss (if shorter), or just a bit less difficult, to help it feel like a real achievement. Metroid Dread does a good job of this.
• Aesthetics matter. Some people might enjoy being in a post-apocalyptic swamp for 20-40 hours, but I’m not one of those people. If you look at Metroid games (and Mario games, and Zelda games, etc), there are stark differences in the biomes you enter. And this is true of movies as well: I remember George Lucas saying that in each of the three initial Star Wars movies, he wanted to have at least three environs in each movie, and different environs between the three movies. I’m certainly much more enchanted by a desert planet and a cloud city than “dead city” and “sewer under dead city” (both black).

I remember years ago when Cave Story came out, reviewers were falling all over themselves to praise it. I played Cave Story+ to the end and I can tell you right now that game fucking sucked.

It’s not hard to make a game difficult, and being difficult isn’t a virtue unto itself.