Not insignificant, artificial difficulty.
If you scale your game's difficulty by adding elastic/just beefing up enemy stats/trigger happiness then you're a bad developer and don't care about the player. There's a difference between grinding through bullet sponges that can kill you in 1 hit and outwitting a foe that takes cover when necessary and attempts flanking. Same goes for Racing games too.
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This, but not just damage scaling. I hate dark souls 1 and 2 because the only reason it's hard is poor map design, hit detection issues etc. Dark Souls 3 and Bloodborne are beautiful games and still hard, but in a good way.