There is no such thing as doing something you "Shouldn't" in a single player game. Period.

I don't care whether developers call it accessibility or cheating, as long as such features are built-in, I will appreciate them. If not, and I find a game too hard, I will shamelessly use an external trainer.

I really dislike RTS games for example, but I finished all the WarCraft and StarCraft campaigns using cheats and external trainers, purely for the story. I couldn't care less what anyone else thinks of it or what label they use. If cheating was impossible, Blizzard wouldn't have gotten my money. Everybody won thanks to cheating.

This is also why I don't use consoles. No trainers over there for the most part.

Hard becomes unreasonable when it is unreasonably hard for you. And when that is differs from person to person.

It used to be that you could get a Game Genie or similar device, then use it to cheat by modifying the game, but that went away on later consoles. (I think the Nintendo DS may have been one of the last consoles where this was possible.)

Hacked consoles make cheating possible in more recent games.

Emulation also makes cheating possible, and pretty easy if you have the right emulator. Hex editing save states is a great way to cheat, circumventing any checksums or encryption that would be found on the game's normal save files. (Worth noting that checksums do serve an important purpose; they keep you from loading corrupted data. Some games combine checksums with hidden extra copies of each save; Zelda 3 for example (as can be seen with one glitch that can undelete a save file).)

They were brought up before I said those are accessibility features per the developer (and game menus), so I would say yes there are those that say that they are cheating. I mean I get it, there is the mentality that games should be as absolute hard as possible thus anything that makes things easier is just bad. But I think a lot of this comes from the whole Steam achievement and platinuming where you can't just play games for fun. You have to prove that your worthy to a bunch of people you don't know and whose opinions shouldn't matter.

Since you mentioned Orwell, I probably should pull it out of the backlog and check the game out. I got it in one of those big itch charity bundles and tiny text can be an issue for me. There's no reason to keep the game if it's not playable.

One thing I did want to add to the earlier conversation...

As I've gotten older and time has become a more pressing issue...

... I've slowly moved away from a steady diet of "hard" games.

Certainly, I enjoy challenging games, but if sections of a game take days or even weeks to clear (as opposed to hours), I will tend not to play them.

This is one of the reasons I no longer make a mad dash to From Software's games. Do I respect what they are doing? Certainly. And I love a good boss fight. But do I currently have the time that From Software demands of me? Probably not.

Still, I would not ask that From Software cater to my needs; I respect them for sticking to their creative mission. And IMO "cheating" would undermine the experience of their games.

But most games aren't From Software games...

I've never cared about achievements and don't care what other gamers think of how I play. Nobody even knows how I play, since I only play single player and dont' talk to anyone about it. I don't usually tell people how I play with myself. : P

For Orwell, you can check out a lets play and see how the text looks to you.

Never! Get good or die trying! How dare you play the game your own way and disrespect the devs like that? /s

In all seriousness, for me it depends. If I feel like it's a skill issue and I care enough about the game I'll try to beat it the hard way for the sense of achievement.
If I feel like it's bad design or a balance issue then I'll either cheat/cheese or simply give up on the game.

I agree with others that your age and free time will definitely influence your decision-making on this.

Oh yeah, I do remember the rail shooting segment in Far Cry 5 in the beginning of the game. I'm a tough, macho, badass gamer guy, so I started the game on HARD, and the section wasn't really balanced enough to justify keeping it on hard. Thankfully, you can change the difficulty during gameplay, so I threw it on easy to see what would happen if I did the bare minimum of shooting from the passenger seat. Turns out not a lot, it's almost like easy makes the damage values insanely deflated by comparison.