...should have added a laughing emoji to indicate I was joking, lol.

that's a fair point, but there were other factors as well. I forget the term, but as an example, there's a concept where a dev/playtester plays the same part of the level over and over, so they can pass it with ease, never realizing that to a new player, that part is actually hard as balls. considering the relative youth of the industry, this wasn't properly known at the time, especially with so many new studios popping up all the time.

Honestly, I'm not even shitting on these old games. There were piles of lemons, put out by shovelware companies galore, but the games seen as classics became classics for a reason, even if the difficulty was borderline sadomasochistic.

That being said, there's something funny about people who look fondly back at games that make demon souls look like a cakewalk being called "whiny man-babies".

No, that was bad game design. Either from refusal to spend the time to implement responsive controls or through shit game design that was modeled after arcades where the goal was to kill the player to farm another quarter.

It's very possible to design a game that is both good but brutally difficult, but lot's not fool ourselves, a metric fuckton of games from that era were hard because of abominably bad game design.