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TBH I missed nerd arguments

I think this might chase more people away more than anything else. Losing forward progress, sometimes significant progress, and having to reclaim your body afterwards or lose even more feels a lot like artificial bullshit when we live in a save-scumming/auto-save/checkpoint era.

Further using the Uncharted 2 example, I beat it on Crushing but they added Brutal to the Remaster collection. I tried Brutal, got shot in the head and died immediately a few times because the mode is basically one-hit-and-you're-dead, and decided that was my limit, I didn't have the patience or desire to develop the skills to keep playing the game at that difficulty. If the game originally released with that difficulty level as the only one, I never would've progressed past the first area or so and just would've played something else instead of it becoming one of my favourite cinematic-style action/adventure games. The decision of what kind of experience I wanted out the game would've been removed from me and then I just wouldn't have had one. I may not have even bothered playing through it on Crushing if that was the only difficulty level because having the story withheld because of gameplay skill is more annoying to me, I don't consider story a reward for good gameplay (it's not the PS1 era anymore). I beat it on an easier mode, loved it, figured "Hmm, this might be do-able on a higher difficulty", did that and then I think I did it again on Crushing after that. I got the same story experience each time but different gameplay experience and skill progression, different feeling of victory on higher difficultly after overcoming each challenge (I was expecting to get stopped on Crushing difficulty at some point and wasn't expecting to beat the final boss on crushing at all).

You get the story and the progression, but the stress-levels and skill necessary to do something on a higher difficulty is different from mostly breezing through a game on a lower difficulty. Like I beat Uncharted 2 two or three times on various difficulty levels. Easy/normal was a breeze, never felt stressed at all, never worried about running headlong into a firefight unless the game was programmed to auto-kill me or something, and I got to enjoy the story and how it worked into the gameplay without having my relative skill level hold me back from seeing it. Hard/Crushing changed how I played the game, how often I progressed, and how satisfying it was to beat a level. The video game isn't coming from your head either, though. Tracing or copying someone else's drawing is arguably when you're doing on easier-modes, it's a shortcut to getting the results you want without needing the full skillset to do it yourself, and generally with achievements and trophies, you know who's actually accomplishing the hard stuff these days, so it's not like they're passing it off as if they beat the game on hard mode/passing off the tracing as their full skillset.

There's not an easy way to draw well but anyone can draw. And you also don't have to draw well to like doing it.

The tricky thing about video games is that not everyone will play the same game for the same reason, and forcing the player to play the game how you specifically want it to be played narrows down how many people are going to keep playing it. If I'm into a game's story, then being stopped by gameplay is the most aggravating and least fun thing the game can do, because story to me is not the reward for good gameplay and that's what high difficulty turns it into. I want to see what happens next, stop getting my way etc If I'm into the gameplay or even feel like I accomplish something in the game, then higher difficulty is fine (ex: I don't think I ever had fun playing the Last of Us even when I beat it on hard mode, but it felt do-able after beating it on easy and I wanted my trophy statistics to look better than beating it on Easy looked). I did beat Dark Souls and did experience the "OHFUCKOHFUCKOHFUCKOHFUCK." I killed the giant wolf a lot earlier than I should've due to learning the pattern and executing, shit was heart-pounding, but when I look back at it (Ddrat, da-da-da-um-da), all the hours of stress didn't feel worth the 30ish minutes of feeling accomplished at the end of it because dying in an open world like that was so punishing (I probably "quit" at least 20 times not counting Ornstein and Smough).

Absolutely should have easy modes. There's nothing more ruinous to your enjoyment of a game than not being able to progress past a certain point.