Arcade games were the equivalent of present day pay to win games.
This is an incredibly midwit take and only demonstrates that you've never become proficient at any arcade game in your life.
The best arcade games straddled a fine line between difficulty and fairness - on the one hand, the manufacturer needed to ensure that the arcade operator got return on his investment (boards weren't cheap), but on the other, the games couldn't be impossibly hard that players' only option was to credit feed through them - this would kill interest very fast. Plus, many games had checkpoints that would get you utterly fucked and recovery was very hard (for example, Gradius III).
Sure, there were some really unfair games, but they were really the minority. Most arcade games - and certainly the most successful ones that are still remembered decades later - reward careful play and observation, and the 'skin in the game' (buy-in price) made sure that players were engaged for the duration of the sessions. Weak whiny bitches would just quit and call the game unfair, but that's life.
Modern 'monetized' games are nothing but evil dopamine dispensers, skinner boxes for retarded lemmings. Full of extraneous shit that are more akin to slot machines than anything else. They're nothing like old arcade games at all.