Interestingly, I was going to blame my inadequacies at Mario on having grown up only playing PC games and therefore relatively little in the way of platformers. I'm not sure there was a big-name platformer for PC was released in my entire formative years, and if it was, I certainly didn't play it.

Link to the Past was also quite hard, but I cheated at that (abusing the saving/loading from the Switch emulator version) so I can't compare. But I blamed it's difficulty on its old-fashioned controls: you can't attack in a direction unless you move in that direction. I find this extremely frustrating and limited after playing more modern top-down action games like Hotline Miami.