Yeah, it would be nice if in ER when you beat a Boss or at least when you beat a Remembrance Boss the game would activate your Great Rune. That would be a small but nice change.
In DS2 you don’t lose immediately 30% of your health when you die and you can mitigate that further with the Ring of Binding. The finite amount of item pick ups is also a bit higher than in DS3 (at least I think so). Enemy drops of Human Effigies are also more common. Also there is another infinite source of Effigies: you can trade Prism Stones with the Birds for them. Tedious but infinite. (You can buy infinite Stones from the cat.)
Still, I stand by what I said initially, the feeling of losing the bonus of Embered is much less bad than slowly losing your max health in Dark Souls 2. Even though it’s nice story telling through game mechanics. The Cursed One losing themselves to the curse and slowly turning more and more hollow.