The difficulty is the thing, in that series.
if you mean dark souls by this, my thing is, i can't tell how difficult they intended it to be.
i think people just played it wrong.
once elden ring came out people had enough experience to correctly guide new players into leveling vigor. but it wasn't always that way, and some guides still exist on this website which maintain the terrible advice of old, which told players to level damage stats and to just learn how to dodge.
somewhere along the line i think the game feeding back 'you should get more HP' got ignored by the people trying to hype up its difficulty. like they took the thousand runbacks to bosses as a sign that the game was just really hard, not that they had some terrible ideas with their approach.
for anyone brand spanking ass new to the souls series, if you ever decide to try out dark souls 1, i want you to level vit to 30 as the first thing you do and get back to me how hard the game is after that.
https://imgur.com/a7zbPmp.gif