Unpopular opinion: I don’t see the harm in including an easy mode.
Make it so you can’t plat the game or get all achievements in the easy mode, and don’t make it too easy. What’s the harm?
Let people enjoy the atmosphere and art without being able to Plat or 100% it in the easy mode. The purists will still play the normal mode.
I think it depends on how you frame it. Is it "harmful" when games have difficulty options? Objectively not since most games have these options.
I wouldn't say its a good thing if developers need to compromise their vision for a game because of social media outrage though.
Demon's Souls is a 2009 videogame that was followed by Dark Souls Trilogy, Bloodborne and Sekiro. They all share similar elements and all have a singular difficulty mode.
So we can say its obvious that the developers hold a particular view on gaming, challenge and difficulty and this is part of their game design.
For some reason people were kind of fine with this for a good few years. The games were seen as difficult but that was fine.
Now there are more and more voices basically putting pressure on developers to include easy modes in every game. That's a bit weird.
Plus there's a big contradiction here. The games get really good reviews and sell a decent number of copies. Yet there's this thing of suggesting the developers are "doing it wrong".
If Sekiro and Demon's Souls had flopped then maybe there's a point here. If every game, or even just a lot of games, was shipping with brutal difficulty there theres a point here.
For now I'm just not seeing why a small number of games can't just be allowed to do their own thing.