I feel like the idea that, for example, Bloodborne, is an RPG, is just weird, and totally at odds with what always seemed to be understood by the term.
Doesn't that just miss the point of what RPGs actually are?? I don't think they were defined by the fact you customised a character, levelled up etc. That's part of it, but it's not the essence.
The essence to me was that you were on a long quest, and that was driven by the ability to get deeply involved in the world and its characters. They're the original interactive stories, really.
The Souls etc games are action games, but just very complicated ones. The deep mechanics are part of that, but when those same mechanics were pioneered in RPGs, that was done to REPLACE the element of action, since everything was turn based.
I feel like this is something that's just intuitively obvious, but that everyone's been convinced to ignore by this faulty leap in logic: all RPGs have levelling up mechanics, therefore all games with those mechanics are RPGs.