Keep in mind I’m someone who is always for accessibility options in games

It would fundamentally change your experience with the game. Using Elden Ring as an example, the Lands Between is a world that wants you dead and that forms a particular relationship with the player. Going into unknown areas can be tense or even scary and the difficulty pushes you to maybe try out new things to see what works. Within the lore, you start out as no one in terms of the grander story and the difficulty makes you feel like that.

In terms of making games like Elden Ring more accessible, I don’t think the answer lies in just making the game easier. Game design is more complicated than that. FromSoft knows what they’re doing and design their games like this for a reason. Every FromSoft games since Demon’s Souls has been more accessible, but never has the way they’ve done that just been “make it easier”. Using Elden Ring as an example, the base challenge of the game is quite high, but there’s always more stuff to do, so you never have to spend time fighting a boss over and over unless you want to. And that’s just one way the game is more accessible

Having a Difficulty everyone plays allows the community to share their experiences without having to put a Caveat on them e.g. “just beat Elden Beast, that fight should have let us use Torrent but I got it done I feel so happy” then other players who beat the Final Boss who faced the same challenge can relate to the experience. If there was a difficulty option then every time someone beat a Boss or dungeon and talked about it the community would instantly respond “what difficulty where you on?”, you see this with summons and OP weapons already.

So the answer is having no difficulty option actually reduces gatekeeping.