It's not about being difficult, it's about being fun. Just because you want choices to exist in the game, and you want consequences for choices, doesn't mean you need to insert annoying or un-fun aspects into the game. Randomly picking and getting thrown back to a title screen to reload, skip back, and try again, is both very un-fun and very annoying.
There are so many options. You could just not have choices there at all. You could also just not have a maze at all if you are going to insist on being 'philosophically pure' with respect to choices and consequences. There are many things that are not mazes, any of them are options. Though if you didn't have choices here, this would - by neccessity - hardly the only place choices could exist so I don't think the whole 'purity' thing rings true. You could even just make the consequences less severely unfun, like just a quick "oops, dead end, let's try again" bit.
There's really no reason at all to do things the way they are. It's really just one of the worst cliche bad designs you see in visual novel type games.