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.
I replayed it recently and the hidden mechanics are just bad game design. Not docking the game but there’s no way to tell the reasons for certain scenario failures, even when addressing all the customer thoughts and using all existing information.