I'm okay with soft enrages like in M4's ending phase. Where if you take too long, the boss will start ramping up their damage consistently to the point where healers will eventually run out of resources and the party cannot continue. It exists in old fights like Nidhogg too through Akh Morn increasing stacks each time. It gives fights some pressure and helps with storytelling for bosses that are pushing you to their limits.

I dislike hard DPS checks / hard enrage. Using a pass-fail check isn't fun to me. The games I played with hard DPS checks in normal mode was hated on by majority of the players in the community because it eventually became a huge gatekeeping mechanic that discourages rewarding moment to moment decision making in less-than-ideal situations. Hard enrages is effectively: You must do XYZ correctly and you can't fail it or it's a wipe. It somewhat defeats the purpose of raises and getting weakness/brink of death debuffs. It's not a game if you aren't allowed to mess up. It just becomes a strict dance and execution with less ways for creativity and skill expression. I see that kind of thing belonging more into Savage than in Normal Raids. Not to mention, if the boss has a skill that can immediately wipe you out with a hard enrage... the fight would've been over if they just used it at the start of the fight and didn't use it on you because... reasons. Feels like extremely shoddy storytelling to me.

I'd wouldn't mind seeing DPS checks with checks that end up not killing the party, but instead applied a damage down/negative debuff when failing it. I personally rather see stuff like a Heal check during a DPS check instead. Something like in Warqor Lar Dor where you want to have good DPS to not stay in that phase for too long as it burdens your healers while healing the stack. I feel like this is the best case where it combines both a soft enrage and a DPS check into one mechanic.