The difference is the challenge in Ds3 and BB is controlled. There is a baseline to that difficulty that always falls into the tough but fair category. ER does not share that design choice and that's been proven in many videos with input reading, animations with impossible to react start up frames, and much more. For some people there will never be a hard enough, as shown by people doing lvl 1 runs no problem but those people are a very very very very small portion of the players. So the choice for the average player will be to use a Mimic Tear and one of the crazy weapons or spells. This is bad design, because it shouldn't be either god-gamer levels of skill or cheese. That's why previous From games are so loved because while it takes a bit of effort to learn the skill set, most anyone can beat them without "abusive" tactics.
I mean fucking DSP has beat every souls game. DSP!!!! If you know.....you know.
But they can. Most of the people playing Souls games for the first time, play them on reputation alone. While they may look up guides later when they get stuck, there is no reason to look up boss guides, or build guides because the fundamental way to beat every boss in BB is "Dodge attacks, and hit them back." There is no grand plan, what build does a hunter have really? Put points into the stat your weapon likes. That's it. So yes I believe a lot of the other souls games can still be played pretty blind.
In ER you are thrown into a giant fucking world and given a pat on the ass saying, "Good luck bro." So it's design in general is more promoting of looking something up to figure out where to go and what to do and when to do it and so on.
Like you said, it's not inherently bad and some people will really like this game design. But I believe that liking something doesn't mean it's good.
Does it though? I mean what do you mean by freedom of progression really? You are free to get lost and find random shit, but that's not always progression especially considering the huge amount of junk behind random cave boss number 324. Same thing for build variation, you are either big weapon, fast weapon, two weapon, or magic. That's really it, much the same way I don't really think the build variation in Souls games is generally good, nor do i think it's that important. The reason why "builds" feel different in Souls games is strictly because the weapons feel different due to the move sets. But if you are a person hitting a thing with a weapon, the type of weapon really isn't relevant because the playstyle is mostly the same, hit the guy with your thing and dodge away to not get hit by the guy's thing.
I don't much see a way to argue how a Katana plays differently than a longsword. Nor can I really find a way to argue how Comet Azure is different than summoning a moon to land on someone's face.
Let me be clear it's fine to like the game, and it's fine to enjoy how it did things. People like different types of games. I hate Breath of the Wild exclusively for how shit the weapon durability system is, but some people love the fuck out of that......some people also love cocaine so what do I know?