Wasn't that also the case with early Final Fantasy games?
I know
Final Fantasy IV, at least, was made easier for the US release...and then made even easier than that for a later Japanese rerelease.
I can't speak for other developers, but in my experience, a decent number of Square Enix games, not just
Final Fantasy, have been made easier for their international releases. For a somewhat recent example, when I played through my US copy of
The 3rd Birthday after completing several playthroughs of the Japanese version, I noticed a lot of enemies had their health and damage tweaked for the US version. For an example that isn't out yet, we're getting the rebalanced version of
Bravely Default from the start.
As far as what Fifth is talking about with games being made
harder for the west, the Japanese versions of
Contra games have almost always been easier than their US counterparts, because of (EDIT: to use
Hard Corps, often seen as one of the hardest in the series but seemingly not representative in this regard, as an example) using lifebars instead of one-hit kills.