Unpopular opinion but I can be this way and I honestly hate games for it. I'm a big Last of Us fan but I despise how you're supposed to have this cutthroat realistic adventure but at every junction they just goade you into picking the obvious route that goes against the narrative. There's no reason to follow that path except the meta element that you know there's going to be some bullshit coin there. And if you maintain the atmosphere and ignore it, at the end of the level in some games you'll get a whiny 'oops! You only got 4/8 coins you dipshit!' that makes you feel like you're not playing the game right.
In a multiuser online game 35 years ago (yes, such things existed back then!) I designed a river with a waterfall and a cave behind it. The cave was hard to reach, there was a chance at every step that you fell into the river and were swept away and had to start over.
The cave was empty. Later, I added a locked chest. Which was empty, too.
If there's a piano in a game, you need to be able to play it, even if you're just tapping out a couple of notes. Likewise, if you cut there's a waterfall in a game there needs to be a cave behind it. Them's the rules.
AFAIK the earliest time this was written into a story was in The Journey to the West. Which is the story of Sun Wu Gong, The Monkey King who is by some considered the earliest ‘superhero’.