I think you can balance a game as a designer before hand. But not everyone might agree to it. Some might think its still too much damage, some too little. Some balancing are super obvious and some are barely noticable. Generally it's difficult to make everyone happy.

Yeah, I always try to check for expectations regarding lethality, for D&D at the very least. Most tables I play at favor narrative so strongly the stat blocks almost don't matter. I accidentally forgot saving throws on my latest monster and it was, uh, embarrassing lol (speaking of obvious).