Mostly just learning patterns, telegraphs, and timings, and getting a sort of “ok I understand this now” buzz from the learning process. Sometimes not even that, but just taking the right approach to a fight.

I think this is where (at least for me) the appeal of souls games is. You can watch hours of videos, or read the whole wiki, but even in the easiest builds, you have to build the muscle memory to do certain things, and a large part of the feel-good brain chemicals come from that. The way I would design an "easy mode" would be maybe a bit more hand-holdy, or handle other parts of the game (like levelling up certain stats) automatically, making the experience more about bashing zombies in the head with a sword while rolling, than about minmaxing your stats to get the optimal build.