Thing is, those cheese ways are often not something first time players attempt(or even know exist for the most part). Hell, it's not something people on their third run through do that often. There's even speedrunners that don't do the cheese shit because it's not always reliable. Because it requires intimate knowledge of game mechanics, world, locations of items, exactly how many souls certain things cost, exactly how long it takes to get the starting equipment, and a variety of other factors. So honestly you can continue to argue that any attempt to dumb down the game makes it worse at the expense of catering to people that don't pay enough attention or refuse to learn from their mistakes and blame it on the game(there are a handful of areas where this is actually true in the Souls franchise, don't get me wrong, but there's not many of them.)
Hell, if you want numbers, look at Twitch, something like five Bloodborne streams with barely double digit numbers, a dozen each at least of DS2 and DS1, each with at least fifty(with the exception of TPDS, which I'll leave out for obvious reasons), hell, even Demon's Souls has more viewers than Bloodborne right now. The game died nearly as fast as Evolve did, and alot of it was the removal of options, you get something like seven weapons, only like three of which are actually any good and aren't just gimmicky as all hell. They took out alot of magic and just made them into rechareable use items, limiting builds immensely. They got rid of shields, and moved it completely to dodging(which I was personally fine with, it was the easiest playstyle for me in DS1 and 2, but alot of people liked that extra security, even if it was mostly just in their heads), and introduced a parry system that sometimes didn't work on the same types of enemies at the same frames of the same attacks. Not to mention PvP turned into who farmed up the most blood vials before banging the bell on the nearest wall instead of actual skill or outplay. Which leads into the next thing that was an absolute nightmare in that game, namely the farming mechanic which was a gigantic waste of time later on, because as Souls likes to do, their bosses chunk you each time you get hit, and you will get hit alot more in BB than any other game, it's just the nature of the way it's set up, so each boss attempt you're going to go through at least five vials, and you can only have like a total of 120 before you have to go and kill some easy to kill, but also costly in terms of bullets.
At least later on you can just buy them, but it's still such a waste of time. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed BB, but I've gone through DS1 and 2 with three different playthroughs each, with a total of six different builds. I played through BB once, and still have no desire to go back to it, because you can't go tanky, Ima face tank and trade blow for blow against this mother. You can't go rapier and just have one GOOD blow every five minutes. You can't be the rolling mage that screams terrified around a fight throwing random spells at people. Instead, everyone is the guy they wished they could be in those other games by design, you're the pro dodger that knows exactly when to jump to get away from an attack and get in a couple hits while parrying and insta-killing shit.
I mean, it's fun for a while, and then you realize there's not a huge amount more to the combat of the game. I mean you can still do Chalice dungeons, but their components are once again farmed items that don't have a guaranteed drop. And you can still find easy 5-second ways to kill the boss like Dragonrider in DS2 or Bed of Chaos in DS1, but that's not something people do on their first few attempts at a boss.
And then there's fighting games, where there's honestly a pretty wide variety, but all people see is the Netherrealm shite and Street Fighter(both of which are very pretty and visually exciting for the most part, but NR likes projectiles way too much so most fights become just standing and throwing shit at each other past a certain point, and anyone that doesn't have them had better have an endless combo you can pull off)
In short, yes, simplifying games makes them "worse". In some cases it can be good, but there's alot of genres and games that need that complexity to work. Rimworld's an ok DF clone, in some ways it's even nice that you can directly control the colonists, but they're braindead if you don't in so many situations. And there's no Z modifier, meaning that you're stuck with whatever is randomly generated with your map, but it also makes some things easier because you don't have to worry about aquifers and primordial evil Ratkings or whatever. Divekick's a simplified fighting game, it gives quite a bit of practice on spacing and footsies, but that's about all it's got, it's a party game.
I think there is a reason that recent character action games have experimented with getting away from dial a combo combat engines. (specifically DmC and MGR:R)
