Games

I eventually got a cocktail of mods that made fallout4's progression bearable to me. A headshot on anyone without a helmet was always deadly, armor mattered, hp barely scaled with level. Endurance and its perks were more important.

The best solution for me is probably combining horizontal progression with some constraints in stats.

Imagine the toughest guy possible. Pick some numbers to represent that. Maybe 200 hit points for a simple, familiar, system. Now figure out what sort of abuse he can survive. 10 handgun shots to the stomach? Ok, let's say a handgun does 20 damage. Then just keep going. How many shotgun blasts? Don't let stats exceed the caps casually. This should hopefully let you avoid the "naked bandit takes forty shots to put down" problem.

The other part is to focus on horizontal progression. You start as a dude who can fire a pistol. Later you learn rifles. Then first aid. Repair. A trick shot to trade damage for accuracy, or the other way around. You're gaining new stuff to keep things interesting, but your numbers aren't really going up up up. Guild Wars 1 is probably one of the best examples of this.

Thinking about it, I really liked Sekiro. It had very limited stat progression, but it was also winnable without ever increasing your stats. Games like fallout4 tend to create stat checks where you're losing because your numbers, not your tactics/execution. That's deeply unsatisfying to me in a game pretending to be an action game. Like, in fallout 1 it feels better when my level 2 dude misses a shot. In fallout4 I clicked on his face he should be dead, but the numbers say no.

But to your last point: people do like progression. It let's people feel like they're improving without actually needing to improve.