Even though they were a bit too easy on the whole, I'd rather have Demon's Souls unique boss fights with interesting ideas over Elden Ring's 2000 variations of giant clusterfuck janky monster that makes Bed of Chaos look well-designed in comparison or 2000 variations of generic dude in armour that does 100 shounen anime combos per second any day of the week.

Tbh I feel like Fromsoft drank too much of Bandai Namco's marketing kool-aid when it came to the Souls series (which includes Elden Ring for the purposes of this conversation). When Demon's Souls and Dark Souls 1 came out, it was only the marketing from Bandai Namco which put a lot of emphasis on the difficulty with all the "Prepare To Die" stuff, like you said the games themselves focused more on exploration and uncovering a mysterious dark fantasy world with your own character.