Depends on the game. Some games have to be set to hard others don't, whatever makes the game balanced the best and creates the most enjoyments. The Witcher 3 for example needs to be set to at least the second hardest difficulty but is best at the highest difficulty. Robocop Rouge City seems completely alien to me as to why someone would wanna play on anything other than easy, RoboCop is slow and he should be a tank. Bullets should be bouncing off him and not be depleting a health pool.

I prefer games that are tuned to one difficulty like Sekiro but I also like when a game seems it's tuned very difficult and creates slight modifiers with easier settings (and not just higher health, more damage) like Khazan The First Bezerker. Slight tunings would also be for timing like parry windows and what not, the older I get the more I see I don't have that reaction time some of the time, even in the 7 years since Sekiro released it takes me way longer to get the reaction timing going if I had dropped the game for a long while even if the muscle memory still knows what to do.

TLDR: I hate difficulties levels but some modifiers can be nice, when they are like changing a car from Manuel to auto but mainly I like when a game is tuned but allows for you to over level a few if you're having a rough time. That always seems the fairest like with souls farming or doing side quests in an RPG.

I'd rather play something that goes towards the difficult side of the range. It's very satisfactory to overcome diffuculties in a game

Not too fussed as long as make progress with each playthrough. Nothing infuriates me more than having to re do the same part over and over. I like stuff like Xenoblade, where you start off weak and underleveled, but you know you will eventually grind through to take out that level 80 giant monkey that gets you near the beginning.

I do love a good challenge. For example a couple of the Master Levels in Doom Eternal are brutal on Nightmare to the extent I felt genuinely kinda exhausted when I finished them which made it that much more satisfying. In general I actually prefer when a game doesn't have difficulty options and instead the difficulty is highly variable with it being not that challenging to get to the end normally while having brutal optional challenges.

Hollow Knight is a great example of that where most people can get the easiest ending if they keep trying while only a very small number of people have done the hardest things you can do in that game. I want to experience brutal difficulty but not from the very start basically. If there are gonna be difficulty options though there should be optional sliders that let you do stuff like speed the game up and in general go far beyond the hardest difficulty option.

Very Easy/Story to Normal.
I can't think of any game I was ever able to beat on Hard Mode. And there are some games I cannot beat on the normal mode.
Another reason I usually gravitate towards easy is saving time and because a lot of games don't even have an easy mode so I take the easy mode a lot of times when I can.

I mostly resonate torward games usually considered hard, like Fromsoft games for example. To me they are not necessarily hard, just challenging but fair. And extremely enjoyable. Easy games bore me very quickly.

Even when im playing something meant for a more relaxed gameplay, like Stardew Valley, i always end up min/maxing cause i feel the need to. Gotta be efficient.

I generally find modern games very easy so I usually default on hard if there is an option, but it is not always the best idea. Xenoblade 3, for example, just makes the enemies have a ton of health and each battle takes hours. So I had to.turn it back down to normal because it wasn't fun.

While I prefer games with a set difficulty I also like games that are meant to be replayed on higher difficulties, like Bayonetta and Astral.Chain, or GoldenEye and Perfect Dark.

I love all the soulslike fromsoft game and Roguelikes/lites are a new favourite of mine because of the inherent challenge the genre provides.

All the way up to the seventh generation, I usually played on normal. But when games started to all want to be RPGs in length, even the best ones, I switched to easy because I don't like being stuck on the same game for too long. If the game is average/short in length, though, I'll play on normal.

I always choose normal since thats usually what the developer intended the game to be played at first. If I love it I might do the hard mode next. Never easy mode.

Most games, action and RPG included, I prefer easy.
Aside few enjoyable flight sims, driving games are almost only ones I want rage hard. Puzzle/adventure should have some challenge too.
I think that when game has four or more difficulties, there should be "too easy" and "too hard" included. This should especially be true with strategy and sports games.
(Note that over 90% of what I play is at least 15 years old.)