The bit about avoidance might be insightful. Some people have anxiety about reading and writing, and the LLMs feel like they're helping. But as this post says, they're not. They're making the anxiety worse in the long term.
Many people legitimately are bad at reading and writing. You'll won't find a ton of them here, on a platform that's mostly text, but they're out there. Struggling though life, probably embarrassed. An LLM that purports to let them skip uncomfortably engaging with text probably feels like a godsend. But it's a trap. It's a tarpit they'll get stuck in and never develop skills of their own.
Yeah I don't really like the model where it starts basic and hard, and each failure makes it a little easier.
Feels like it would be more interesting if you started with high stats, and each successful run you had to remove or lower something. Sure, you won with 200 health but can you win with 100? Hades kind of had this alongside the upgrades as you go.
I didn't like dead cells or rogue legacy that much because it felt like I would've won if I had grinded more, and that's not what I want.
I feel like games are usually a mix of execution challenges and numbers challenges. In a pure action game or other games without progression (eg: chess) you win or lose from your decisions and input. But in numbers games, you win or lose based on the stats. There's really no way cloud from the start of the original ff7 can defeat disc 3 bosses. The numbers just aren't there.
Some rogue-lites feel like they're trying to be execution games but have a less clear numbers check on top. Doesn't always work for me.
I do really like the traditional rogue like Crawl: Stone Soup, though. No meta game aside from the occasional player ghost.