Technically is a level cap, 792 lol. Once you hit level 140 or so it costs so many runes to level up you can really only do it after bossfights unless you just find a really good farming spot or something, at least in the first playthrough. In NG the runes go way up so it's viable to start leveling up again then without having to always fight a boss. It's like Bloodborne though in that even if you're superhero level you'll still get killed if you're trying to fight more than a couple of enemies at a time. Like after I killed Malenia (a really hard optional boss, by far the hardest in the game), got swarmed by a pack of rats in a cave 20 minutes later and got killed.
There was one real cheese magic weapon in the game that made it easy mode but it got nerfed in the 1.03 update. Now that they fixed the bug for arcade scaling there is a new cheese weapon that will surely get nerfed in the next patch. Namely, the one I posted a video for early in the thread.
I don't know how to rate the difficulty of the plat since I rarely go for one. No way in I could ever plat the Naughty Dog games for example, but on Elden Ring I have every trophy except the two for the endings I didn't do. Required doing a ton of dungeons and a bunch of difficult boss fights, but you kind of learn to play them as you go. These FromSoft games are always really hard at first. I was getting wrecked early on as it has been a couple of years since I played any FromSoft game (a fact
spurraider21 never lets me live down for not finishing Sekiro lol).