I don't know about the larger trends, but Mario games have always had a lot of them. You fall down a pit and you're dead.

Also it's pretty typical for modern Mario games to have a nice normal difficulty curve, and then if you 100% it you get a final challenge that's just completely outside the bounds of the rest of the game's difficulty. This one was just even nastier than the last several incarnations. I'm not sure what the thinking behind these is, unless it really is "yeah we know you're playing Kaizo hacks."