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 played with cheats almost all the time when I was a kid, but I was rarely doing it for difficulty reasons. I just got used to the idea early on of game engines just being digital sandboxes and loved seeing how far I could push things.
I don’t really understand using cheats as a difficulty bypass unless you’re there just to get the story/explore.
I use ChatGPT similarly. If I want to explore an idea without consequence, I can use it to brainstorm, but it’s not going to be how I lay out an entire project.