Souls veteran here and Sekiro was by far their hardest game for me personally precisely because I couldn't ignore the parry and I suck at it tremendously. Have never managed to get along with parrying in any game ever (I play a ton of 3rd strike and Garou and have done so for almost 20 years at this point and it's the same there, I never could get the hang of parrying reliably) for some reason... beating Sekiro was harder than beating all their other games combined for me and I still couldn't parry reliably by the end, I can't get the timing down to nail it consistently. Weirdly enough I'm a "hold everything two handed and dodge everything while wearing the lightest possible armor" kind of gal when it comes to Souls stuff so it's really weird that I can master dodging so flawlessly and still miss parries so frequently.
:D