Yes, very silly to deliberately choose the mode that makes those words nigh impossible to guess, and then blame the word choice. If you want to make the game harder, try to bring down your guess count.
Meh, on normal mode it resolves down to can you solve a 5-letter anagram with placement clues. I pick a new starting word each day (definitely sub-optimal) and play hard mode.
It got way too easy and boring to use the same word. It's common amongst my friends to have multiple guesses queued up based on what the first word clues give them. I usually just yolo it and for once my awful memory works for me - I can barely remember my first guess from the previous day let alone the subsequent guesses so every day is a brand new game with a different strategy every day.
I usually do a two word opening sequence and go on from that in normal mode. Seems a reasonable compromise.
I actually tired of the multiword Wordle "clones" for the reason that you say. I found you pretty much had to do a 3 or 4 word opening sequence and then mostly solve anagrams. Otherwise you end up wasting too many guesses trying to solve one word that has a lot of options.
That's me, sometimes it takes me many minutes to pick a starting word I haven't used yet, usually I look around the room until I spot something with five letters.
My guess is it was an easy, logical thing to add, and he didn't immediately see that some words would be impossible to solve. And you can't just delete a feature, even if the stakes were bigger than some players opting into extra frustration.