Were older games actually harder, or were they just less forgiving?

I recently went back and played the original Super Mario Bros., expecting a fun dose of nostalgia. Instead, I got humbled. Within minutes, I was missing jumps I'd made a hundred times as a kid, running straight into enemies, and realizing how little room the game gives you to recover from mistakes. No autosaves. Very few extra lives. Miss a jump, and you're often starting the level all over again. It made me realize that classic games and modern games are difficult for very different reasons. Today, games like Elden Ring and Black Myth: Wukong challenge your reflexes, pattern recognition, and patience. They're tough, but they're also packed with quality-of-life features like checkpoints, save systems, and tutorials that help you keep making progress. Older games didn't always have those luxuries. A lot of their difficulty came from limited hardware, simple mechanics, and the expectation that you'd replay the same sections until they became muscle memory. They weren't necessarily trying to punish players; they were often designed around the technology of the time. That's probably why finishing an NES game felt like such a huge achievement. You earned every level through repetition, persistence, and a lot of trial and error. I still enjoy modern challenging games, but revisiting those classics reminded me that "hard" doesn't always mean the same thing. Sometimes a game is difficult because the enemies are smarter. Sometimes it's difficult because the game simply refuses to give you a second chance. What do you think?