I think it is. It's not original but it strikes a pretty good balance of progression and difficulty.

If you run into an area that utterly destroys you, it means you're either not meant to be there yet, or you've missed something in the material/equipment progression chain.

yes and no. If you're competent at Dark Souls you'll pretty much slaughter anything as long as you have the right tier of equipment. Parrying has a large parry window and once you have the right shield allows you to reliably deal with large monsters. You can also dodge roll with a large i-frame window.

Each biome tends to have swarm monsters and a big goon squad monster of some kind. there are also elite versions of each monster that hit much harder and have more HP, but drop more resources. A lot of the time you get killed when something unexpected happens, like getting swarmed and running out of stamina, or when you don't notice and elite monster in a big mob of enemies. The fully upgraded gear from a tier is almost as good as the un-upgraded gear from the next tier, so if you take the time to upgrade your gear you should be able to advance in tiers without getting pwned. As you go through teh game you'll encounter enemies that are very dangerous in different ways and need to be adapted to, but you'll also find equipment and recipes to do that.

Be sure not to over-extend yourself. Your food increases your HP and Stamina but the max stamina and HP starts to decay when your food gets to the half-way point on it's timer. Topping off your food whenever it gets to the half-way point is resource expensive but keeps your HP and Stamina caps as high as possible which will keep you alive.

Preserving your skills by dying as rarely as possible will gradually make you very powerful compared to someone who dies a lot and loses skills, or a new player with undeveloped skills. In my recent playthrough I was considerably better at archery, running, jumping, resource gathering, and damage output bc I played cautiously and died very rarely while other players who leeroooooy jennnnkins'd their way through the game suffered from stat decay.

I'm a big proponent of pooping out little forts and holdfasts wherever I go. You can track my progress across the map by following the string of tiny 2x2 forts with a door, a covered fire, a tier 1 workbench, and some spikes outside. Being able to retreat to a defensible space to eat or heal or whatever can be a life saver, especially once you hit some of the later biomes that can be extremely hostile when you first go in. Having a little fort can also give you a defensible bridgehead if you get killed and need to go back to recover your gear so you don't pop in to the area naked and immediately get ganked by monsters.

Over all it's much less punishing and miserable than a lot of survival games - You don't die if you run out of food. Unless something unusual happens you can always recover your gear. Buildings refund 100% of their cost when broken whether you disassemble them or they're destroyed by monsters. It's as much an adventure game as a survival crafting game and you'll spend a ton of time exploring and poking around in old ruins and whatnot.

90% of anything is a massive pile of shit, being part of the 10% isn't generally considered unique.