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.
We were so bored back in the day we spent hours, days, months finding out how to get by stupid things in point&click games, it was better than not playing them but it was also not like the best time ever either.
I don’t know if we “got smarter” by it really.
Being bored was the healthy part, developmentally speaking.
Not that there weren’t overstimulating games back then, or healthy problem solving games today. But with enshittification, the shit is drowning out the gold.
As a horny teen, Leisure Suit Larry was the closest thing to smut in a game that I could get. There was no internet walkthroughs. You wanted pixelated boobs and innuendo? You had to try every item in your arsenal and every dialogue choice to get it. But damn was it fun!
Later, going back to the games and using walkthroughs, some of the solutions seemed rather silly.