DnD tends to be balanced between the levels of 5 through 12. Most modules sit in there. But I'm not saying anything controversial when I note that 5e CR is a bad way to do encounters.

I feel that this is really 5e and 4e specific. 3.5 is kinda borderline and in my experience 2e and older definitely do feature things that are effectively "if you go in there you die, lmao" types of obstacles and trend more towards a sort of survival-horror tone, where surviving is in itself an accomplishment.

Meh, I can make a Swara bastet / Tremere abomination with ranks in Celerity and mage powers and cybernetic arms from that one Pentex supplement who can attack 30 times with enchanted plasma cannons, doing 300d aggravated before Cain gets his first action.

I do feel like sometimes players have a sort of laid back, "we should just win without too much trouble" attitude. Sometimes this manifests as "we take a long rest after every fight". And that's a fine way to play, so long as everyone's on board. It can be kind of bad when half the group is kick-in-the-door-lol and the DM is expecting more tactical depth. I think because D&D is many people's first RPG, you'll find a lot of bad habits there as new players rediscover them.

Depends on the level of the PC, and/or if they can come up with a really good reason why a bunch of weak mortals could feasibly defeat a literal god. If the plan is clever enough, fuck the rules and stats. The point is to have fun.

Shadowrun: Great Dragons don’t have stats because the players will lose.

BECMI ends with Immortals, so the _concept_ of playing extremely powerful characters has always been around. While I'd imagine the vast majority never played with those rules, the same is true for modern D&D. A vanishingly small number of games actually make it to level 20.

The Pathfinder game i play can be brutal. The party has learned to just nope the fuck out if something looks sketchy. The dm told us at the beginning that the world was "real" and we're just thrown in it, so nothing is level adjusted.

It's also fun in the other direction. Like Exalted has stat blocks for mortals, but the PCs are literally built to fight entities more powerful than gods. An encounter with a mortal is always just a narration scene even if combat ensues. You can pulverize ten of these guys without breaking a sweat, but do you? What does your choice say about you? Exalted isn't a game about fighting mortals in quantities less than an army, and there is no threat in doing so. Any tension in the scene is purely about what the characters do with essentially unlimited power. And that can be interesting and tense for some groups and in others it's a thirty second aside on the way to fight timeless terrors.

Exalted literally let's you have your own army of mortals and it functions like an equivalent of grenade in most normal games - something to just throw at the bad guy.

The dog on the left is such a strawman lol. Those who would say such a thing are few and far between. I know plenty of DMs and players who think the PCs' combat encounters should be challenging and even lethal.

May be few and far between but I can vouch for it; I had a party like that whom I hated DMing or playing with in their games. Myself though I am as you said someone who prefers the challenge; both exist in large numbers.

The number of times my cleric/sorcerer has had to revivify the rest of his party…

If you ain't dying, you ain't trying.

It is actually bad game design in the sense that there really isn't a decent mechanic to escape monsters. 5.0 orcs, for example, had double the speed of the average PC with their dumbass free move action. The solution is rolling disengage as a series of skill checks (like World of Darkness would...) but then you have to explain how, exactly, a dude in full plate escapes a dragon.

Beat the campaign by forcing the DM to explain the logistics of how the monsters find their daily calories

Okay you still die

It's never the real god, just a physical avatar. There's still a lot of Batman vs Superman narrative horseshit in the idea though "Oh you surprised the guy who moves faster than most speedsters and can hear and see everything around him. Sure, okay, then he leaves and throws an asteroid he found within half a second from orbit before you're done blinking"

This is very game dependent. Right now I'm in a pretty brutal one where everyone is branded by the goddess of mind control and we have miniboss encounters with our own former PCs who've been turned into grotesque monsters - but I've also played in games where the PCs were newcomers to Olympus and more or less ended up recreating the first few God of War games.