One thing every gaming generation agrees on: Unwinnable dead ends in adventure games was never a good idea.

Sierra was notorious for them. I suspect they only sold games to make money on help liens.

Even Monkey Island's notorious stump joke was mild in comparison.

IMHO dying for the stupidest reasons was the worst. At least it made for some nice dark humour XD

Kyrandia I was praised as "beginner-friendly" when it was released and had reviews with very good ratings. Lots of older adventure games had mazes and there are worse mazes in other games than the Kyrandia games, e.g. the air duct maze in Martian Memorandum. You can even get a blueprint of this maze in the game but it is still confusing and there is a dead end with a graphical glitch where you have to restart the game.

Nowadays, you can see much more negative reviews of the Kyrandia games because people don't like certain things anymore like the mazes. I think it has something to do that people play these games differently. Back then I used pen and paper to make maps and notes. I remember drawing maps for several games like Kyrandia I, Zak McKraken, Eye of the Beholder, etc. Nothing has changed here. I still do it.

I like all three Kyrandia games and I really would like to see a new game in the world of Kyrandia /Lands of Lore.

To be more precise I would say the worst thing was to actually punish you for those deaths. They could make a joke out of those situations and that might be fine, why not use some random deaths as a way to make comedy, but there's no joke when you lose your progress and have to start over. Kill me for a stupid reason if you have prepared something worthy, but after that just let me continue where I was!

I thought I'd go foor a replay of the series and I got so angry at those mazes, they were a way to claim the game was longer with low quality time consuming content. My memories of playing the games first are nice, not sure if I need a new entry in the series. But now there's a new Monkey Island and even a new Simon the Sorceror coming, even Little Biig Adventure has been resurrected so it's a great time for old IPs nostalgia. I was joking about a new Gex game recently because of the Squeenix IPs acquisition, new Ninja Turtles game coming as well...it will be just like in the old days again! Golly, the song of the moment is Running Up That Hill! I'm playing Sumatra and it manages to "feel" classic without the bad sides of old pnc - maybe too much backtracking. I have a preference for this than replaying classic games I have loved in the past and ruining my memory of them. Lands of Lore is just wonderful and aged quite well.
And yes, back then I'd keep notes and draw maps for videogames and gamebooks. Today it would be unconceivable unless the game tells me before hand so I know it's part of the deal - how they added a notepad function to Beautiful Desolation, great game but I could never remember the location of a character I needed to talk to, turns out it was a common problem. So that is a solution too, let me take notes in-game then.