These gearing systems are designed by people in boardrooms with the effort of trying to get people to play longer. They don’t consider how fun it will be, or how it will feel, except as a “we can’t let this become too unfun or people will leave”
So they are trying to toe the line between true frustration and slowing people down to get them to play for more weeks.
I think this is really short-sighted. They could focus on making the game really fun, and then people would stick around because it is fun and not because they were manipulated to do so.