I have. Some games are better as hard games, and some games are better as easy games. An example I've used before is Resident Evil 6. Me and a friend tried to play it co-op and we put it on the higher difficulty setting because we tend to prefer harder games. And we played RE5 like that so it made sense. We quickly found that the game sucked as a hard game. It made sense to simply race to checkpoint to get fully healed. Why bother actually engaging with the game and waste ammo? We soon lowered the difficulty and the game was a lot more fun to play, because the game clearly wasn't designed around being hard. The difficulty selection didn't do anything for us, it actually made the game far worse. In fact, most people agree RE6 is a bad game. And the worst of the RE4-6 trilogy. I'd say one of the ways to fix it would make it a lot more focused, instead of trying to please everyone. And that's not to say they'd have to get rid of difficulty selection entirely but severely reduce the amount of options and choices given to the player. Options are not always good.
Resident Evil 2 remake has difficulty selection, it has Normal and hardcore. Does this mean that a small amount of people might not enjoy the game because the normal mode is probably a bit too hard? Yeah, but the game is supposed to be a survival-horror action game. It makes sense that it isn't a "for all ages" family game. It's simple, games are very complex. And different games are going to work better or worse with different systems. Some games can have a simple number adjusted difficulty system that doesn't take a lot of development time to implement. Other games would need to adjust countless details of the game for every difficulty selection that you add, essentially creating another version of the game. Metal Gear Solid 2 comes to mind. That's a game with many different difficulty levels. And each level changes guard placement, changes certain mission objectives, changes how certain boss ai works. A ton of work went into that, but MGS2 is a pretty small and narrow game. It's pretty understandable why a Dark Souls game doesn't do that. Especially when it also has multiplayer modes.
And I'll also address what I consider an elephant in the room on this topic. You know cheat engine exists right? If that's too much work for you, people usually make easy mode mods for hard games 2 days after release. If you really, really want to play a hard game without learning it, you can just do that. Sure, you have to play the game on PC, and it's a little more work, but you can still do it. I think that makes a lot more sense than yelling at developers to make games they don't want to make. I like the Animal Crossing games, if I ever a Hardcore Animal Crossing or whatever, I'd look into modding before expecting Nintendo to make it.