All signs point to that program being a failure for them, which is why the exclusivity offers and announcements started drying up, but I guess this is them trying a revised strategy.
Yes, I answered your question with a question because your scenario was as absurd as you perceived mine to be. So I'll answer yours directly: "yes, but not at that scale". Because at that scale, it's a review bomb.
It's a free to play multiplayer game. If you continue playing it, you're providing value for some other player who might spend money, so just by being in the matchmaking pool, they've got you where they want you, and they won't care about your review.
They've sanded that frustrating learning experience in subsequent games to the point where Elden Ring now has more traditional tutorial pop ups, and unsurprisingly, it's their most successful game to date. That and the aforementioned evidence lead me to believe that the experience a lot of people had with Dark Souls was not what they intended. And you can absolutely get to a few points in Dark Souls 1 and get stuck without a guide; I know it happened to me when it came time to walk the abyss, and even having read item descriptions, it's very easy to forget the one description of one ring you got potentially hours and hours earlier that would solve your problems.
If you're interested in a roguelike metroidvania, I'd highly recommend A Robot Named Fight. There's also the Batman Arkham collection that just came out on Switch, and the first game, Asylum, is a 3D metroidvania.
There is a bit of a continuing story in Splinter Cell, but for the most part, each one is its own story. I'd say I was fairly unimpressed with Pandora Tomorrow and Double Agent, but neither is bad. Conviction is very different from the games before it but still plenty of fun, and Blacklist somehow manages to marry Conviction's gameplay with the classic gameplay of the series in a modern way, but Michael Ironside was battling cancer at the time, so Fisher was unfortunately recast. If you're asking the average person which one is best, most will say Chaos Theory, and then you'll get a contingent of people such as myself who prefer Blacklist, but CT is still great.
As for the old Baldur's Gate games, no better time than now to go through them. I'm inching closer to finishing 2 after beating 1 earlier this month. They're great.
Skullgirls, which is now my favorite game, scares people away with its tutorial, so I ended up making my own for it instead. It was through resources for a bunch of other fighting games that I ended up realizing what I wasn't understanding about Skullgirls.
Honestly, you could probably just put fighting games here in general. Understanding what it means for a move to be plus on block is super important, but most new players will have no idea what that means. I can only name one game, Fantasy Strike, that teaches you to jump to escape command grabs.