Do you change the general difficulty when playing a certain game?

I tend to play everything on the hardest, or second hardest, but as I've been replaying Last of Us.. The game is, to me at least, entirely based on the story so I don't know why I'm getting so mad at the difficulty of Grounded instead of just lowering it, but I can't help but push through it til the next hurdle of shit in the way.

Do you change it up, or generally deal with the struggle of loot and ai damage buffs, or lower it for a game that is more story focused?

I'm considering a new general rule of "open world, amp it up, story based, lower it down"

Then you have cases of something like Horizon, or GoW, even Witcher to some extent, where it's a mix of both..

Not sure why I'm sitting on this thought as much as I currently am, but here we go.