Who said that monsters are "supposed" to be consistent
I'm saying it, OK?
Since at this point you clearly just want to be fastidious and petulant I'll feel in the right to be dismissive about it.
And I'm saying it because that consistency is important in making them believable. When my party will spot for the first time a couple of trolls, I want to know that these are real trolls, not their gimped parody. And every time I'll fight trolls after that, I want a finger on the pulse of what I can expect. Up until the point my men will walk through them as if they were barely a worry. Bbecause that's what makes them feel like part of the fictional world rather than some World of Warcraft autoscaled bullshit that keeps appearing from level 1 in the newbie area up to level 100 in the epic expansion.
And I don't want to fucking see a single level tag, because when I see "troll" or "Direwolf" or "Golem" I want to know what it means by first hand experience, not numbered tags.
That's how the old games always sold the illusion of playing a D&D campaign in a computer game, why this one should feel the need to be the one that changes things?
I'd be fine with same enemies of different power levels if there were visual differences between them.
That's a different story. A visual difference, or a plot reason to be different than average, makes them effectively different monsters.
Which is acceptable... if done with moderation and not abused (i.e. there are only so many types of wolves of increasing difficulty you can digest before being fucking fed up with them).
