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.
I had a a guidebook for Desperados. I ended up using the “hide around corner, shoot, and then blast everyone coming around the corner”-tactic instead of the guidebook 80% of the time.
desperados and commandos were both just that kind of game. i revisited desperados recently and the amount of mileage you can get out of “lie down in tall grass, quicksave, stand up, shoot, lie down” is frankly ridiculous.