Scaling is a strange beast.
Levels and gear are meant to symbolize your character strength and progression (and give positive feedback to the player), but character strength runs counter to player skill. When a gamer obsessively checks everything to not miss anything, in the process he's lowering the difficulty of future encounters by stacking experience points and gear. If you love the game and explore all of it in one run, you are slightly ruining your experience aswell.
In past games, when you were stuck somewhere, you'd grind and come back more "powerful" (retry with easier settings). Nowadays, I believe developpers try to eliminate the "grind" (thankfully for me, as I don't like grinding).
I believe levelscaling is to adress an "equality of outcome" problem, to obtain some kind of uniformity of perceived difficulty experience. As opposed to an "equality of opportunity" approach, where a game is kinda difficult to begin with, and gamers just have to L2P or grind (which is usually not casual friendly).
So, levelscaling would maybe be one way to adress this "problem", and in the same brush would diminish (or twist) player's control over the game difficulty.
Levelscaling should be somehow tied to the perceived skill of the player for it to make sense (to me), but it almost never is.
I didn't play Skyrim. But I played FF8 (and even though I didn't like it, I completed it several times, go figure). This game had some very botched form of levelscaling.
From a naive point of view, there is no point in a levelling up system if it's to be a red queen race (I say naive because a levelling up system isn't just about game balance). Furthermore, such system is prone to abuse if not mastered. FF8 had deep flaws: it was very advantageous to stay low level in the late game, with the latest spells. In a sense, the levelscaling didn't change anything at all: underlevelling was the new overlevelling, and the balance was just more convoluted.
In my opinion, RPG developper should get rid of character levels and think the progression differently (in term of character abilities, or esthetics, or...), and reintroduce a level system only when it brings something. Because most of the time, it is just an artifact that is being brought out of habit and that brings its lot of problems while not being particulary significant in the first place (and worse: give headache to players who don't like having to theorycraft all this shit).
