Caramel Caramel is perplexing

See, on one hand, it's a quite fun shooter, with a vibrant and colorful presentation, decently challenging levels, and a really cool theme to it. I love it when I manage to get really far in it, as it always feels satisfying.

On the other hand, the difficulty curve feels more like a big cliff followed by a valley. I feel like the first boss is WAY harder than most other bosses in the game, and the cookie before the first boss has resulted in more ragequits than anything else in the game.

This is, of course compounded by the fact that we start out with 0 lives, there are no mid-level checkpoints, and the score-to-lives exchange rates keep getting worse and worse as it goes on.

It's like the game is trying to make you give up right at the start, to then let you loose for a while until you either beat it or run out of lives.

Is this intentional? It's such a surreal experience to me.