Yea it's pretty bad. I think they're not really great at making enemies or AI or combat mechanics so they use player restrictions to make it more difficult.

They are right, it would be too easy if you scale it back, but that's not our fault, they shouldn't punish the player because they don't know how to make the game actually challenging and skillful.

Large supposedly scary enemies just fly into rocks and roots and get stuck and sometimes just walk into them and can't figure out how to get around it. They all have super easy to predict attacks and whatever parrying is silly easy it's all a joke.

It's really unbalanced and honestly don't see how they can fix it without going back to the drawing board.

In order to scale back stam usage they need to actually add skilled challenge like harder enemies that actually know how to fight. Which I haven't seen anything like anywhere in this game. The only thing that knows how to fight in this game is a Growth. Well done on that one. The rest all suck.

So if you ever why you feel so restricted just go fight some enemies and pay attention to how bad they are at fighting. They had to do something I guess... but is making us all 80 years old the answer? I guess we did die, so maybe we are old af and just can't breathe anymore lol.