90% of games I play, I will play purely for the story or some aesthetic that has nothing to do with gameplay. There's nothing wrong with having lower difficulties to give more people the option of that experience. There are ways to do it that isn't just "you basically can't die" and maintain some form of challenge without completely alienating people. Despite my preferences for games, I have no problems with challenging myself. I also have a fondness for going for trophies/achievements in games, and playing on higher difficulties for that purpose (otherwise I've always been a "default setting and done" type of person with most games). However, I have never gone anywhere near a 'Souls' purely because of what I hear about them from literally everyone. Have even got a couple for free through PS+ and never touched them because I ligitimately don't want the headache no matter how much I am interested in some of the story elements and things like that. If there was a difficulty option I might actually consider it and then push into the higher difficulty based on how I felt from there.
It's entertainment software. There are (at least) dozens of different ways and reasons people enjoy this medium. It's stupid to limit the audience for something purely because of a "git gud scrub" mentality.
Also, thinking about this topic reminds me of the video series Jim Sterling did where he would read elitist gamer comments as an 18th century french nobleman or whatever it was: