The analogy makes a lot of sense to me. Once you have an “easy button”, it’s hard to not use it. It’s sort of like when you’re at work and see the “quick workaround” effectively become the standard process.
I remember burning out on games because the cheats made them really fun in the short term, but afterward playing normally felt like agony.
That’s not just Souls-likes though. And only Elden Ring is really open world in that way (I think, haven’t played much of any of them). What you’re meaning is that open world games aren’t for you, which is a lot more games than just Souls-likes.
I generally love open-world games, but really don’t like any of the Souls or Souls-like games. The whole thing of always being so focused on the enemy, having to time dodges and parries just isn’t how my brain works, and I lose interest and/or give up very quickly. I have no issue with hard games, but I feel a lot of people who love those kinds of games have some kind of masochistic trait that makes them keep exposing themselves to the shit those games drag you through. I don’t get super happy or feel like I’ve overcome something big with these kinds of challenges, it’s just “fucking fuck, it’s finally dead, I feel like shit and have used up all my consumables, that was not fun in any way. I need to go do something else because I almost had a panic attack from all this crap”. The story just ends up not mattering because there’s always this burden of forcing yourself to get past every millimetre of the game. I love really hard puzzles though, and stuff like platforming and so on, almost anything except that very Souls-specific soul crushing style.