I've never been a fan of the boss runbacks in Souls games and I'm glad Elden Ring has moved away from it. IMO the runbacks don't add any extra challenge to the game. I'm not going to bother fighting any of the enemies on the way back to the boss, I'm just going to run past all of them. It just adds extra tedium with each attempt, and if the boss itself is difficult it can turn it from being a fun challenge to just frustrating.

I also don't like that every other indie Souls-like game has to include annoying boss runbacks just because Dark Souls did it. I hope that with Elden Ring mostly doing away with those that future Souls-like games will have less of them too.