First article is rubbish. To be honest, why discuss something which is obviously used as a tactic by a lot of developers to aim at the lowest common denominator?
Second article is interesting, in my opinion, even though I'm not a fan of simply ramping up difficulty to torture myself. I'd prefer to keep it at medium, thank you very much.
Speaking about difficulty levels, I talked about this to a friend who studied programming a year ago and he told me what most programmers will surely do to ramp up the difficulty level is to use cheap tricks such as adding more enemies, making both enemy's armour and attack higher, make the protagonist die much easily, etc.
I noticed quite a number of games use this, so, to me, I see no point in ramping up the difficulty.