Yeah, good point - in any progressive roguelike/roguelite, required grinding just to improve base stats to make a win possible goes against the core premise of "this is hard but possible, when you lose it's your fault for not knowing the systems well enough."

I think the mechanics of roguelites are fine, they work really well and it's not super hard to do it Well Enough, it's just that it's so overdone as to start feeling cliche at this point, IMHO.

Yeah, Slots&Daggers (and CloverPit) both leaned hard into RNG-as-progression. This makes it a lot easier for players to blame the dice when they lose, but comes at a cost of loss of perceived agency, but agency is central to roguelikes. Tough balancing act in those cases.