It was something I became aware of and leaned into, but it wasn't my intent to make a passive game. I mostly just wanted to come up with a unique and interesting game mechanic, and maybe action games not usually being very passive led me to designing a more passive style of gameplay for better or worse. Some of my inspirations include Skyward Sword and Ocarina of Time, which have some pretty passive fights that require patience and observation, so that was definitely a factor. And while it wasn't as big of an inspiration for this, I'm a big fan of Sekiro, which requires the player to be extremely observant and reactive of the enemies attacks, and often encourages you to wait for the enemy to approach. Idk, maybe I'm just a sucker for more mechanically passive games, and that just happened to bleed into my design philosophy.
Though it was never really my intention for the player to not have to move for so much of the game. The wizard initially didn't have the hazards, and you could beat the entire fight standing still which I found a little underwhelming, so I added the hazards to force the player to think about them and either move around them or try to parry them (though in retrospect I may have overtuned the difficulty of that fight and overestimated a new player's ability to memorize a sequence while avoiding another attack)
Anyways thanks for your feedback, and for returning to beat it. You bring up some really interesting points and got me thinking on the nature of games being more active or passive mechanically.