it was going to make me start from the beginning each time

that’s actually not the case, after the third gauntlet room there’s one of those giant drill spikes you have to hit that falls and breaks through the floors below, letting you skip all 3 major gauntlets, only leaving the short 4th one

regarding runbacks, imo they’re fun, so sure, they take time, but anything in a game takes time to do. And all but one of the runbacks are less than like 40s long, I see them as a phase 0 of boss fights, and greatly enjoy them. They also change things up so it’s not just permanently fighting the boss itself the entire time. My caveat here is that the movement system being fun adds to that a lot, so in things like the 3rd person Souls games, if it’s just a long sprint, it’s not as interesting, whereas Silksong has one of my favorite movement systems in gaming, so I even looked forward to the runback when I died against Last Judge.