Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hard disagree. All of my favourite games of all time have dynamic difficulty systems. Not stupid stuff like levelling up enemies in Bethesda games - but actual skill based games that get harder depending on how good you are at it: Resident Evil 4, Battle Garegga to name a few. Games that unlock more content as you reach skill gates are the most memorable.
Completely agree here, scaling enemy stats is cheap and boring, "you are supposed to last 10 minutes in this fight, so the boss has 20x the damage and health because you overleveled" kind of boring.
When the increased enemy health means you need to find new effective strategies and explore the depths of your moveset, and making less mistakes from increased damage - it can be really fun. Dante Must Die mode in the Devil May Cry series, or Master Ninja in Ninja Gaiden, are basically the only difficulties I care to play in those games. But along with the extra damage and health the enemies also get new tactics, which keeps things fresh and engaging. The health caps in Quake are pretty ingenious too. You level up in this games by actually increasing your skill - not by arbitrary progression gates.
When your combat system has no depth and it basically boils down to just mashing attack and circling the enemy - it definitely sucks. Bandits with glass armor in Oblivion from the level scaling is difficulty done badly.
When I’m looking for a game that I really want to sink serious time into - I always look at games with in-depth scoring systems. Scoring is great because it’s an objective measure of how well you’re playing the game the way the developer intended. Bonus points if there are online leaderboards. The style/rank systems in DmC and NG are some of the best design scoring systems for action games IMO, they allow player expression but still give you a fairly objective measure of how well you’re playing the game.
I used to play a lot of Dark Souls and speedrunning or using arbitrary rules (level 1 runs, 1 weapon only, etc…) was how the community essentially created a scoring system for themselves - which is great it provides longevity to the games. But these days I look for something a bit more defined. So I eventually turned to old school shoot’em up, run’n gun and character action games for this. For shmup and gunners specifically, the mechanics are simple on the surface but the depth comes from figuring out how to best make use of them to overcome the difficulty. The simplicity also makes them some of the easiest pick up and play games, and don’t require as much comittment as something with 10 minutes cutscenes after every 30 minutes of play.
Sorry for the rant, hard games with in-depth scoring mechanics are my current obsession, and I don’t get much opportunity to really talk about it.