What you call "pussifying", I call "opening up to more people."
More than what? People were playing games en masse since late 70s. Every housewife had the ability to play a round of Tetris (not particularly an easy game, mind you!) for decades, and a lot of them did so. It's not like game console sales skyrocketed since the N64 era, either (N64 itself was one of Nintendo's worst-selling consoles, actually).
The reason I call that pussifying is different, and consists of the fact that gamers raised on N64-era games can't even deal with the stuff "unfair" games throw at them without elaborately expressing their frustration, and instead opt to avoid it altogether. As you just said yourself, in fact. And don't tell me you've never seen YouTube commenters who can't even fathom the fact that some games are meant to kill you in less than three hits! Another wonderful side-effect is that the modern console games are all very long and, instead of raising replayability by making the game process more fun, the major developers try to artificially increase it via unlockables. Which pretty much never works if a game isn't entertaining enough to begin with.
There's a certain charm to a game that forces you to play it over and over again to slowly get better until you beat it (Touhou lol), but most NES games embody this via trial and error gameplay with an unhealthy dose of memorization.
Because we know Touhou games don't have a lot of things that inevitably kill you until you find and memorize a way through, right? Even more so in the more recent games, actually. And in every Extra stage, period. But Touhou games do have an advantage of sharing replays, so you can write off the whole "finding the routes" part so it seems way more fair.
To touch another aspect of this, Perfect Cherry Blossom scoreplay is an extravaganza of learning where to bomb or suicide for cherry, what area of the screen to go to to graze effectively, what trajectory to graze in, and so on. EoSD is pretty similar in that regard. SA and MoF both share this awesome frustrating quality of slicing up to 30% of your potential score per single death. Now that's really fair. UFO requires you to learn a precise route to summon the UFOs exactly where you need them. The Touhou games have these elaborate scoring systems for a reason, this reason being scoreplay. But since you, as a true self-proclaimed Touhou fan, don't play the games for score, you happily disregard all this and continue to hail the games as the definition of fun. I know it's only your opinion, but you aren't being fair here, either, or at least don't seem to put the whole situation into perspective.
Also, allow me to repeat myself:
The definitions of fun and fair play have changed.
Pretty much everything deemed unfun and unfair now wasn't back in the day. People
could derive fun out of it then. If you can't enjoy something, it is a loss, and can't be treated as anything other than that.
