I'm just quite baffled by the arguments the white knights try to make in this case, labeling it as "skill issue"

So you're trying to tell me that wasting vast amounts of time during a battle where you hit a brick wall due to not having the right spell assigned is a "skill issue".
I would get that if you'd have the right tools and still fail, that might be the skill issue you're talking about but having like "deal physical damage only" checkpoint if you haven't slotted one in advance cause, ye know it's day 1 and you're going in blind, wasting another 15 minutes in the process is just not fun. It's not a challenge whatsoever, it's go progress into a fight just to realize you haven't slotted the right thing, you don't need any skill for that as you couldn't possibly known beforehand what kind of brickwall the game throws at you.

They just clearly don't have any sort of idea how to pace single player games - it showed in FF16s sidestories and it shows here in form of carnivale - they either make things piss easy or jump rope ohko styles - how are players supposed to improve if there's nothing inbetween?