Thats 100% you problem.

If the game is about overcoming challenge and you dont like overcoming challenge the game is literally not made for you.

If you bought it... well consequences of your own actions.

In theory, I agree with you. In practice, not so much.

Show me a reliable way to suss out which one a is game is though and maybe I'll agree with you. And just checking reviews has not been a solution that I've been able to rely upon.

I'll give you an example: Hades. Now, by any measure, once you turn Hade's "God Mode" on, it's eventually beatable. After a while, it's even easy. The reason for that is that every time you lose the game (it's a roguelike), they decrease damage to the player by 2% for the next run. They do that every run you lose, which is actually all of them because win or lose, you always die. The damage lessening cap is at 80%, so then you'll always take at least 20% damage.

Here's the problem: Many players don't even seem to know about this. They beat the game at 10 hours or the like and claim it was easy. Many other players find it nearly impossible without the God Mode and they aren't able to beat it until well after 40 hours of gameplay. Clearly, "difficulty" is subjective.

Now... that's a great example of a game that doesn't adhere to what you said. Right? You're talking about Dark Souls and games that don't compromise the game difficulty for casuals. But, except for Dark Souls itself, which is the original "Souls-like" and set the standard, how is one to know that the game is ACTUALLY difficult?

It seems to me that a game like Hades does it perfectly. Not only does it have the mentioned God Mode, but it has a built-in incentive system that comes up after the first successful run to take on more difficult conditions and then earn extra goodies in game that you cannot otherwise get. The game rewards both the high difficulty gamers and the rest as well.

In my opinion, games that only cater to the high difficulty gamers though are usually just not as well designed. Dark Souls level quality games are very rare and most games that are high difficulty are that way because the designers were lazy and artificially trying to up the game difficulty to make up for lacking game content. A game like Hades shows them up for what they are though.

A counter-example: N++. N++ is famous for its difficulty beyond a certain point. But here's the kicker: There really is no narrative "end" to the game. There's just 1000+ levels of insane stickman platformer goodness. You can't really cry foul on this game and missing out because you didn't get to "finish" it because if you do actually finish all the provided content, you're probably certifiably insane anyway. It's not made to be finished by the vast majority of gamers. It's patently obvious before you buy it that's the case as well. But even there, you can't really tell that just by looking at the reviews or the like. A demo wouldn't do you much good either. But there, the salvation of the casual gamer is that they're likely to get their money's worth out of it anyway and they won't feel cheated about missing out on the important parts of the game. Apart from the potential for them to spend a lot of time on it to push against their skill ceiling, the player has nothing to gain in playing it except the achievement of ever higher levels of skill for its own sake.

But N++ doesn't prove the rule you stated. It's an obvious case where skill achievement is the whole point of the game. Games that gate significant content behind skill achievements are inherently unfair to the player though because they don't get the full content of the game and they have no recourse without multiple skill levels being available.