There is still a place for that kind of difficulty. Not everything needs to be designed the same exact way. If a developer wants someone to do it all in one go, that's a very legitimate design choice.
And when you do beat it, it will feel even more rewarding.
Absolutely. Once in a blue moon—or twice, I guess, if we account for Byleth getting into SSBU—I actually get to feel catered to as the target audience for a video game. This was one of those times, and I am
sure as hell going to relish it, gloat about it, cross swords with the detractors, and ask for more.
People who want a Celeste-style experience of tight error margins but checkpoints on every screen have plenty of other options (chief among them the excellent Celeste). Impossible Lairs are a rarity, and the whole structure of this game was constructed as a support structure to make one possible as the central trunk of the experience. It's by far the best thing about an already excellent game, and I'll simply never see eye-to-eye with those whose narrow-minded vision of platformer pacing and difficulty design make them quick to accuse the developers of doing it all wrong.
A full range of variable difficulty tuning from 0 to 48 bees—all of that
on top of the existing repeatable one-hit buffer you get from Laylee (rather than replacing it, as some people in this thread have clearly misunderstood)—is a generous spread already that accommodates rapid improvement. It's an indictment of the modern player base that it looks like the developers might have to cave.
For those who have beaten both levels, is Darker Side comparable to the Lair?
Darker Side is overall shorter in top-to-bottom running time, but has more dead air in terms of transitional segments and padding. The Lair has rest stops too for you to catch your breath and read the next obstacle, but they're a platform here, a platform there, interspersed throughout. The Lair also has mid-bosses (which are the main thing that extend the running time, depending on how cleanly you get through them), so perhaps you can think of it as Odyssey's Dark and Darker Sides mashed together.
Even though the Lair is a longer level, I took considerably less total time to master the Lair from my first attempt to the last, because you get to learn from up to 48 mistakes per run instead of 6 or so (and I always thought Darker Side was far too generous with health replenishment). But conceptually they're similar: no checkpoints, so you progressively clean up your mistakes as you go, while figuring out all the best patterns and improving your precision, speed, and flow.
Also, one other similarity they have is that neither Darker Side nor the Impossible Lair actually require you to use the most advanced techniques that are available in your move set. Darker Side never asks for mastery of Odyssey's cap jumps, and YLIL has a few undocumented movement mechanics but doesn't demand them of you either.
For reference,
here's a thread I wrote about Darker Side when I first played it so you know where I'm coming from.
