Same. I started to get really bored with the mechanical side of the game when I noticed how little care there was put in encounter design and overall balance. I got the perception that I was playing a badly homebrewed version of the system by a DM that gave the ruleset a cursory glance, decided that they were more interested in story telling and worldbuilding and came to the conclusion that the combat side of the game didn't really matter and challenging his players would be detrimental to the experience. I went out of my way to not touch anything I considered overtly broken and it was still ridiculously easy up to a point where I would have had to intentionally misplay encounters in order to come close to losing.
Self-sabotage should never be a requirement to make a game feel challenging on its highest difficulty assuming a reasonably competent player.
And before anyone mentions it, the difficulty mods don't fix what I consider fundamental design issues. For instance, core balancing mods that adjust spells or feats so they work more like they do in 5e, such as Haste only providing a limited action, wouldn't affect me at all because, as I said, I don't touch mechanics I consider broken. So installing any of these mods would make the game feel about the same, with the only difference being that I can now use those options without breaking the game even further. And bloating their health and increasing their damage doesn't make the game more strategic and give enemies access to abilities that they should have based on their 5e statblocks.
I'm not going to spend my time playing Minecraft with the difficulty of the game. That's the job of the game designers and they failed. It would be equally ridiculous to expect a person that takes issue with the game's story to just keep installing mods that fix shoddy writing. This isn't DIY game development. I'm not some battered Bethesda fan that factors community patches and a mod list that is larger than the combined length of all Wikipedia articles into their assessment of the game.
