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Re X-COM and reverse difficulty: I think this is mostly a result of players not being willing to sustain losses. If you reset whenever something goes wrong (save scum or campaign scum), you'll get ahead and because the game rewards success it will become easier. Many games "reward success" but inflate away your winnings so fast they might as well not have. Love the modern XCOM reboots. You should try long war. I much prefer 1 to 2 but I could say the same about the base games.
In the original UFO, no. The hardest mission is the first psi mission (～always in January-March), and about the only way a decent player can actually lose a campaign (other than by major unforced errors or self-imposed challenges like failing to check one's finances before the end of a month, ignoring terror sites on purpose, or attempting Cydonia without psi) is to have one's main base destroyed by aliens in January (NB: UFO and TFTD start in January). Part of the issue is that the campaign is designed to be played blind i.e. for you to waste a lot of time researching the many topics that don't lead anywhere, and having any idea what you're doing means the aliens don't scale fast enough. Part of it is that the aliens just don't scale much at all on the strategic level; aliens do increase their operational tempo somewhat as the game goes on, but they don't ever get any better at getting past X-Com's radars and interceptors, while those radars and interceptors get staggeringly better, and as mentioned you can trigger an Alien Retaliation on day one. And part of it is that psionics are just broken in UFO and TFTD (psi-troopers will quickly reach the point of being able to mind-control 3 aliens at once, with 100% reliability, at any distance, and they don't need personal LoS to the aliens; this turns missions into cakewalks once you get to that point).
Terror from the Deep improves somewhat on this, with the "first psi mission is an utter ball-buster" problem mostly fixed (at least relative to TFTD's overall higher difficulty), the strategic game being somewhat more loseable later on (due to Artefact Sites, which can't be avoided and have crippling penalties for failure, as well as the point threshold of a "bad" month being stricter on the higher difficulties), and aliens scaling a bit more. But, well, I've played TFTD on Superhuman (the top difficulty) twice (no save-scumming, to be clear), and the loss the first time was (*drumroll*) from having my main base destroyed by aliens in January, triggered - to my best guess - on day one (the second try won). It's still definitely a pattern.
Apocalypse definitely doesn't have reverse difficulty. The late-game is easy, yes (though the tactical game still isn't rote despite said easiness), but the early-game is also easy; it's the midgame where things get a bit tricky (although honestly, not that tricky; I'd definitely rate Apocalypse the easiest of the original trilogy).
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