If you stick with one starting word, and that word is in the set of possible Wordle answers, then some day, one day, if you keep playing forever, you are guaranteed to get that magical 1/6.
This is not quite the same as the lottery-player's fear that they change their lucky numbers and then those numbers come up the next week... the lottery has no memory, so it really doesn't change your odds when you change your numbers. But Wordle's drawing words from a finite pool.
Of course, if your go-to starting word is NOT in the set (looking at YOU overly optimized people who play crazy words like STOAE that are almost certainly not in the answer set...) then by sticking with that you're guaranteeing you'll never do better than 2/6...
After seeing an asterisk in one of my friends' shares, I'm now forced to play on hard mode as well. I can't risk the peer-shame of skating on easy mode anymore :)
So that being said, I'm bracing myself for the curses-of-early-success this will lead me on. Right now I sometimes toss out a completely different word just to cover the search space. It has led me to quickly narrow down options. Am I screwed if my first guess matches on 2 letters? (Say, "___ES").
I guess that's why it's called "Hard Mode" to begin with.