It's targeting an audience of mindless drones who just want to win, not face a challenge. Blame the consumer, not the developer. You can, however, blame the developer for not having different difficulty settings and having one set in stone difficulty.
Dark Souls II was mind-bogglingly easy with a few brief segments of artificial difficulty, and that's the blame of the consumers. The consumer wants to feel like they've achieved something and Dark Souls carries a title of being "the hardest game ever" (despite being far from it), so with the sequel if they can breeze through it with covenant of champions despite being terrible at video games (e.g. me) they feel like they've really achieved something. From what I played of Dark Souls I (not much, due to incompatibilities with AMD cards) was an absolute nightmare. II was a breeze. Metro: Last Light's Ranger Hardcore mode is similarly an absolute breeze, and probably for the same reasons. Really the only difficult thing about playing on Last Light's Ranger Hardcore difficulty is the inability to see which button you're supposed to press in QTEs. Shadow of Mordor is just the first game to take another step backwards to appeal to a wider audience of people, and it's most likely not going to be the last to be this insanely easy.
I can't speak for Shadow of Mordor itself (I'm only 18gb back into the download, which is just over half) from personal experience, but only what I've heard from others. TB just happens to be a reviewer I trust.
