Why a difficulty setting is a poor idea

There are a ton of games out there where a difficulty slider makes sense, and tons more where it doesnt. This is one of the latter, a comedically small dev team is is already reasonably having trouble balancing the difficulty for one "setting", and they still have to account for player counts which they intend to do but havent yet.

But thatll become even more important in their future vision for the game. Making them try to quadruple that workload for different difficulty modes is just an absurd extra step.

The game is explicitly designed from the bottom up to be very meticulously checking to make sure you have the whole gameplay experience restricted in very consistent manners, and that progression is not only the core of survival gameplay, it is quite literally the entire point (see subnautica forcing you into gradually more difficult areas all of which are driving the story). This is exactly how a good survival game functions, as soon as you let players opt out of a good experience for short term happiness, they will, and theyll be worse off for it.