Others have mentioned existing efforts to form reproducible results. So, this might be irrelevant now; but I’m fairly sure if the mindset was “open source compilers are always better than extremely expensive ones”, the expensive ones wouldn’t have a reason to exist.
That could be an old mindset. (Of course, binaries made way back in that age are part of how we got in this mess)
FFXIV has headed in the opposite direction of your claim. They’ve recently been making a lot of changes to major story dungeons so that the experience relies as little as possible on online communities. Right now, playing requires a subscription. It’s more and more believable to see that requirement removed if the game was somehow dead and that ‘had’ to happen.
Sadly, even if I’m moralistically in favor, there is so much insane computer science logic (and proprietary mechanisms) behind the process of compilation, especially on certain embedded systems where this issue comes up, that I doubt that could ever be pushed into law.
The case I see is like this: Many publishers increasingly argue that they don’t have a strong monetization plan for big epic singleplayer games unless they have a dozen forms of microtransactions. For Sony, the monetization plan for God of War is the PlayStation 5 - and all of the residual purchases that come after someone owns one. 80% of those purchases will be of games that are on both Xbox and Playstation - but went to the latter because God of War and Spiderman are awesome. With that in mind, the teams making those games can sorta just aim for awards, not perfect profitability.
This once again tires back in with patience and recognizing which parts are hard by comparison.
“Time to try Elden Ring! Hm. This first area I’ve spent 20 minutes in is too hard. I’ll go somewhere else. Actually, this other area I spent half an hour in is also too hard. I’ll go somewhere else. Hmm…actually…”
Not to mention, understanding the stat systems enough to respec can be hard itself. And, summoning people to help you often means you’re not learning or engaging with the game mechanics yourself (or, getting slaughtered by invaders - patience again)
There’s genuine reasons why those things as a form of difficulty adaptation do not work well for everyone. People get an inconsistent and unreadable experience, and conclude simply “The game is too hard.” Often, that statement is made with incomplete information, but that’s what they’ve got from trying to learn it themselves. Obviously, if you look up walkthroughs it’s boringly easy and has no sense of discovery.
Given its open world nature, I would bet the difficulty of the game varies greatly depending on where someone randomly decides to explore.
And, any repeat attempts won’t reveal much because on a second go the player will have experience with systems that will keep them safe or at least better conditioned around their losses.
Unfortunately, I feel like only console developers that long ago released their games for arcane bi-flagonal deprucified CPUs get to put out expensive anniversary editions. Everyone who owns Steam copies can still run it just fine.