I would be surprised if many younger people in this era would have the patience to make it to the bottom row of this graphic.
That's not a patience issue, that's a design issue that has been eliminated in modern games.
There's no reason to delay progress by making players repeatedly play through several trivial fights before getting back to where they are having a challenge. It was done in the NES era because they were operating under the philosophy that "the longer it takes to beat the game = the more hours of gameplay in it." It didn't matter if most of those gameplay hours were trivial digital chores like stomping Glass Joe yet again.