I think there's a happy medium between "no limits at all" and "no quality of life at all" and that medium really isn't hard to achieve. Like with UI design for instance. UI absolutely should lean towards being clear and easy to see. In fact clear and easy to see/understand should be the bare minimum for UI. And brighter, easier to see graphics in general? Well, real life is actually quite bright and colorful and, if you're lucky, easy to see. With graphical capabilities getting better, of course games will look brighter and more vibrant. With weapon types, that really depends on if there's gonna be interesting stuff to do with those weapons, as it were. Having lots of types of weapons you can use feels to me like a lesser requirement. The type of thing you devote time to after you've shored up other features, such as races, classes, etc. I think that spells that bring nothing to combat should be excluded if they also don't add to gameplay. A game where spells have good uses outside of combat would be awesome. They don't get ported in as often because the devs will never be able to be as creative as all the people who will play their games, and even with a relatively simple spell, there is the potential to drastically overwhelm the scale of the game if you try and account for every potential use of it within the game. Also, a lack of day and night cycle isn't a quality of life feature. It doesn't make the game easier in any meaningful way.
Fast travel in an open world game is kind of a necessity because you can potentially have massive amounts of space between point A and point B, and having to traverse it all on foot would get boring, especially when the player wants to get on with the story. It's effectively taking the principle in old rpgs of going from one area to the next and putting it in the player's hand. For example with Dragon Age: Origins, you go from the circle tower to Redcliff and the game doesn't make you traverse all the space between them. That's effectively fast travel, just more limited. But the principle is still the same, the devs saying "there's nothing interesting going on in this stretch so we won't make the players experience it."
Regarding lack of random encounters, I'm of two minds about that. Wrath of the Righteous has them, and I don't like them at all. Solasta has them, and I actually like them a lot. So sometimes a game can be made in a way where random encounters just don't serve the experience and the game would be better without them.
You bringing up tutorial areas and story mode are points I entirely disagree with though. Providing a way for people to experience the game more easily is a very reasonable thing, because why not, if it means more people get to have fun with the game? Plus it can benefit players that DO have the skill anyway. I've run through Wrath of the Righteous about four times now, and have wracked up over 500 hours in that game. If there weren't the option for me to tune down the difficulty so that I could engage with the story directly and breeze through the battles, I wouldn't have been able to experience nearly as much of the game, which has firmly become my favorite game of all time. In fact with me, I tend to start games on story mode and increase the difficulty as I become more comfortable with controls and tactices bit by bit. And tutorial areas are just a no-brainer. It's straight up just smart game design. Of course you make the first area easier so that your player will be able to get a handle on the various mechanics. The first section is always going to be the easiest anyway, if you don't use it to teach your player how to play, then you're just wasting an opportunity.
All this is really to say that yes there should be some quality of life stuff included in games, because a lot of times quality of life just means "we've learned how to make better games now." But at the same time, that doesn't mean excising anything that would give games any challenge. It's not a choice between one or the other. Different individual titles will benefit from going farther to either end of the scale. Though I do think that while a small number of players would enjoy the most difficult, tedious extreme, basically no one would enjoy the easiest extreme.
