I pre-killed enemies too and it still took me a bunch of tries, lol. I actually thought I would like to more/cheat past that hurdle but decided I’d give it a few more honest tries because it seemed doable, I was just making mistakes. That is, it didn’t feel unfair to me.

I did use cheats 3 times in my replay of the original Hollow Knight I played in preparation for Silksong: one to deal with a bug where if the soul master hits you as you kill him, he wiggles in his death animation forever, and you have to quit and fight him again. That’s a bug they should have fixed buy never did, so I put on infinite health to be able to brute force through fighting him again. The 2nd and third times I cheated weren’t legitimate, but I was just not having fun anymore, had done evwrything else except the final boss and godhome (which I never did because I didn’t care about it) and I wanted to see the lore / dialogue: white flower, and path of pain. I have no regrets about cheating my way through those because I just wouldn’t have seen that content otherwise (I didn’t do them on my first play through).