Elden Ring is a great example of a game where the difficulty is largely self-imposed, if you play using all the tools the devs give you like summons, magic, certain weapons, etc the game becomes almost trivialized. Not saying that's a bad thing necessarily, in fact the opposite, I think FromSoft's "difficulty slider" replacement is one of the best ways of going about it, however I think the difficulty overall is overstated by the "real souls players" who hamper themselves so as to experience all of the mechanics.

Whenever a game of this kind has a massive launch, a bunch of criticism will come from people who are either unfamiliar with the genre or just plainly don't enjoy it. That said, there's a very legitimate conversation to be had about difficulty in Elden Ring's DLC - I love FROM games and I genuinely couldn't enjoy the final bosses of SOTE due to the amount of bullshit they throw at you.

In general these games have an issue where each new entry (1) gives the player more tools to use, and thus needs to up the difficulty to balance it out, and (2) caters to a fanbase of people who have spent hundreds of hours playing the previous games, and thus expect increased challenge. The end result is that if you go to Dark Souls 3 after completing SOTE you'll be pretty amazed by how easy that game is by comparison.