Psh, I ain't buying it. I think they found a niche and like sticking to it, and maybe like making folks salty. They make a ton of people happy with the difficulty, but nothing about these games are apologetic.
- every death refills your main healing items, so you can't run out
- you keep all the items you collect before you die
- you can recover lost experience points/currency by returning to the place where you died
- you can summon NPC or online co-op partners when you need. This trivializes most bosses.
- other players can leave messages in the game. Lots of them are tricks, but it almost guarantees that you won't miss any important items.
- they're RPGs. If you don't have enough health or whatever, you can level up to correct that.
These games definitely punish you when you make a mistake, and sometimes they are just janky, but if you invest the time it all starts to make sense.
Unfortunately, I think it's their own marketing department that really pushed the difficulty angle, maybe they're trying to back out of that now that they're not an underdog.
Beating Demon's Souls on a tiny CRT in an even tinier Japanese temp-apartment is one of my most cherished gaming memories.
I think of it like going back in time. You walk into a boss, you die.
The game says, "Ok, what did you learn from that death"? "Oh, I shouldn't try to dodge backwards from that attack", "Ok, you're back where you started - try again".
In this regard the games feel challenging but very fair. You can fight that boss for two hours straight and you haven't lost anything (other than possibly the souls you dropped). Any death you have is your fault, and you can't blame the game because you lost an item and now you are playing with another weapon or anything like that.