The eternal struggle
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Sekiro feels like an outlier, even among Fromsoft games. The mechanics are so simple and pure that its kind of difficulty is closer to an indie platformer or racing game. I happen to be in the camp that thinks Sekiro's difficulty is overstated, but since there is no way to outlevel or RNG-hack its challenge, it developed a reputation as one of the toughest games ever. The masses really aren't comfortable with a game that doesn't adapt to their natural level of play and forces them to learn, react and rise to its level.
I'm playing through the Nioh games for the first time lately and I love them - maybe as much as I love Sekiro - but I can't help the nagging feeling that despite a similar reputation to Sekiro, they are... easy. And I'm not the type of person to use easy as a pejorative, I'm fine with not struggling in a game. I do die a fair amount in Nioh, sure, but there is such an absolute glut of ways to overwhelm, outlevel, out-equip and out-maths the enemies, that it makes the ways the devs have cooked up to make the game 'difficult' - mostly cynical and sadistic enemy placement, combined with high incoming damage - come across as comedic more than serious. There is such an abundance of options at your disposal at any given moment that the biggest difficulty is being spoilt for choice. Thankfully the gameplay, as deep as it is, is also incredibly fun as a result. But any challenge you fail to live up to in skill terms in Nioh, you'll soon compensate for and beat with the help of maths, it feels. That isn't as satisfying a feeling as I got from Sekiro... although mastery of the complex combat comes with a different sense of satisfaction to Sekiro.
Most people who beat Sekiro didn't do it charmless, let alone with the demon mode active. This isn't to brag, as I didn't get very far charmless alone, but its unironically turning the game into what its intended to be difficulty wise.
Regular Sekiro you can spam the parry button and fish for hits and do pretty well. Timing isn't super strict and you lose little from doing so. And you still feel really fucking good mastering it regardless, because it is still very hard to do.
But it is a great example of a "Mechanical" Difficulty change that is purely skill based. All it does is take off training wheels you didn't know you had, and makes the game absolutely miles harder.
Agreed, Charmless is where the game becomes a real test, but it's also a natural and harmonious upgrade from the first run difficulty. There was a point somewhere in NG+ (going for the Shura ending) that I thought I'd hit my ceiling and that Charmless/Bell was too much for me and I'd have to throw in the towel. But I pushed through, tried to raise my game and then started enjoying the game even more in NG+2 Charmless (going for the finicky ending with the sakura branch stuff) - and even started having an easier time, despite the fact that you more or less hit a hard limit on attack dmg at that stage (besides expensive upgrades via dragon mask). I sometimes revisit the game for the boss gauntlets these days but never play it in anything less than charmless, since it feels like the most natural difficulty now.
Still, I have a tendency to talk about Sekiro in terms of its first run difficulty, because I know that's what everyone else tends to be talking about. A bizarrely low number of people ever seem to have tried or are talking about Charmless, even when they talk about Sekiro as if they've played it inside out. To me that just cements how unaccustomed most players are to real mechanical difficulty challenges. They just write Charmless off as some bonus mode, whereas what its really doing is kicking off the training wheels, as you say.
But imo rather than parry spam, the real training wheels in first run difficulty is ... blocking. When blocking you're immune from all damage from everything that isn't a rare piercing attack or telegraphed unblockable. Enemies are mostly quite bad at punishing a broken posture bar, as long as you recovery roll asap. And from block, a quick release and re-tap in response to an enemy attack becomes a successful deflect. Once you realise this it reveals itself as a massive safety blanket. I've thought about going back through Seki on NG and timing how long it takes for certain bosses to kill me if I just stand still, hold block, recovery roll after posture break and sprint away from unblockables, no attacking or healing. I suspect multiple bosses will find it literally impossible to kill me. Charmless takes all this away, as it should, but it's weird how so few players ever learn how safe they are in vanilla Sekiro if they just engage with the mechanics, plus the fact that the real learning experience is discovering how to fill every empty moment with pro-active attacking.
You are a better gamer than me, because I absolutely did. But I also feel across all genres my age is slowing me down considerably, and I've always sucked at rhythm games (which Sekiro absolutely becomes at the highest level, it feels like a dance) so I've hit my own limit.
Even right now playing Clair Obscur I feel myself struggling often with basic dodges and parries that shouldn't be as hard as I keep making it look. But that's my personal limit, and I think most gamers are more capable than I am in this department if they tried and pushed (as you did).
One of Sekiro's best traits is that damage is mostly just a safety net. Sure it makes the posture bar fill up faster and decrease slower, but you are very rarely going to actually deplete it. What it does is make you feel like you are making tangible process even as you fuck up (keeping morale high) and saying that if you can just survive you can win even if you never get a perfect deflect reaction going.
By the time you hit the damage cap, you are likely a player strong enough that you don't need it. Your skill is high enough to be Deflecting well and just breaking them.
I think this is a problem with playing the genre too much. You come in with expectations and thoughts from prior games and then pigeon hole yourself into certain mindsets. Sekiro players almost all came from Dark Souls or Bloodborne, and saw they had no shield so they went with thinking about only Deflecting.
Shit by the time I realized how broken the Umbrella block was, I had already 100%'d the game. Heck I barely used any of the tools because they always seemed too niche except for the obvious Flame and Firecracker ones with immediate results.
The game has numerous ways to both increase or mitigate the difficulty with a little effort, but most people (myself included) just defaulted to only the most basic strategies. Which makes it seem much harder than it is, though at the gain of beating the fundamentals in to increase skill level.
Though Mikiri Counter should be a default ability and not an unlockable. That is 100% a fault of the game that makes the very beginning very hard for no reason other than "you didn't know."
Among all the tough moments Seki threw at me, the one I spent longest on, and the only one that almost had me despairing like a real wall of difficulty, was Shinobi Hunter: one of the very first spear minibosses, whom you encounter in the hirata memory. He must have killed me well upwards of 20 times and basically the entire challenge in the end was... learn mikiri counter from the skills list and practice how to use it. I never suffered against anyone as much as against that guy.
Sekiro has a few iffy teaching moments, perhaps none more egregious than Chained Ogre being the very second miniboss you face. He teaches you about the importance of mobility, of staying out of range, of dodging and how prosthetics can carry you... lmao all atrocious anti-lessons for Sekiro, which it takes basically everyone several hours to recover from. Still love it, but it's hard to excuse that.