I try to play games on their intended difficulty. Difficulty level wise this usually means "normal", unless "normal" = "a chore in early game without any items or skills, then at the exact moment your arsenal becomes viable you obtain the pointy acid sword and the 'double all acid damage' skill, which trivializes the rest of the game". In that case I pick "hard".

Why is this relevant? Because the industry has developed a standard protocol to prevent save scumming, such that when a game starts I instantly know where the devs stand. You know the drill: 'this game features an auto-save system; when you see the spinning circle, first don't turn off your system, and second take note that your fuck-up right now has been recorded for posterity and cannot be undone'.

As far as I'm concerned, nowadays if the game lets you save scum, then this is an intended part of the experience. The most blatant example of this is immersive sims (Deus Ex, Cyberpunk 2077, Dishonored) that hand you a bazillion save slots with manual saves, auto-saves and quick saves, all but outright telling you "go ahead, 'Life is Strange' your way through this shit". Conversely, we have games that don't let you save scum and this is also a part of the experience -- Soulslikes, Choose-Your-Own-QTEs (Until Dawn, Detroit: Become Human, etc), roguelikes, and a great many other genres where save scumming abolitionists can celebrate their successful conquest. The devs pick carefully, and I believe they usually know best.

It's reached the point where when I see an overpowered save system in a game, I don't only feel zero guilt about taking advantage of it, I actually interpret it as a necessary concession from the devs -- an essential feature to be ignored at my own peril (think of Al Lowe, designer of ye olde sadistic point and click quests, who said the quiet part out loud: "Save Early and Save Often!"). If the devs chose to allow save scumming, this must be because they knew a lot of game scenarios are frustrating, counter-intuitive and capricious when encountered the first time, to a degree that can make the game not fun. I'm just not up for that.