Yes, it's absolute cancer. I still remember accidentally agreeing to lower the difficulty in one of the original God of War games after dying too many times on a timed swimming sequence (which wasn't even affected by the difficulty iirc).

I don't even like outlevelling the immediate enemies in a souls-like, but I level up anyway because I have no way of knowing if the devs have crafted the fight around my level or something higher, and I see no point in making myself suffer if it's the latter. The inevitable power-creep in those games is a form of adaptive difficulty-lowering when applied to reattempts at the same level. It's why I prefer Sekiro. This was discussed a bit in the 'eternal struggle' thread.