Iron man is a self imposed challenge, it is not circumventing the game design. The games have always allowed you to restart a chapter, some even include battle saves of some kind. The game was always designed around restarting if things went too far south for you.
Permadeath is more about the characters being a resource, and creating a sense of realism. You don’t HAVE to restart, but then you are continuing without said resource. The same can be said about missing out on a key item.
Think of games like Shining Force that use casual mode. The only thing you have to do, is keep your main character alive. This greatly lowers the difficulty, because you can just throw people at tough enemies, consequences be damned. The only cost, is the gold to revive.
Iron manning harkens back to the arcade days. Where games were designed to drain your money. Console games for a good while were also designed to require full restarts. Limited lives in platformers and such. Games did eventually move away from this, and rougelikes became a thing, because people don’t want to replay the same game, but want that full stop lose.
This ‘to me at least’ means, that iron man’s are challenge modes at their core. So “iron man friendly” makes no sense as a term.
I don’t believe Kaga or IS designed any of their games to never be restarted, or to be iron manned. Playing past your mistakes, does not mean never restarting a chapter. It just means don’t obsess over playing perfectly.