My deck did the thing= Feels Good
I wasn't able to do the thing= MY OPPONENT IS LITERALLY EVIL

As an avid green player/mana dork enjoyer, I was about to disagree with you about having a bird bolted feeling worse than having it discarded, but then I realized I actually agree that it feels worse being discarded in a lot of cases, but not for the reason(s) you mentioned. The thing about having a specific card discarded from your hand vs killed from the battlefield is that the hand is generally considered to be a safe place, whereas when you place it on the battlefield you intuitively understand you're putting the card in danger. Whenever I play a bird, I can brace for the bolt to happen, but if i say play a llanowar elf instead of the bird in order to potentially bait a bolt, but they go for thoughtseize instead, well you feel punished when you felt you were making the more disciplined or smart play.

i think land destruction feels really bad because the mana system already feels bad… like whenever you play magic there’s a significant chance you won’t get to play at all because the land distribution in your deck won’t allow you. land destruction targets players who already thought they were over the initial mana hump and were playing “the real game”.

When I was new at this game I  used to wonder why Blue was even a thing.

And then I learned to play around an opponent with 2 blue mana available.

All forms of game play need a counter for the sake of balancing. If resource ramping is available, resource denial needs to be available as well.

I really like land destruction when it only targets nonbasic lands and it allows you to replace the destroyed land with a basic land or have a very cheap land destruction that destroys a non basic but puts two basics into play because I want "greedy" players who completely or almost completely omit basics to be able to be punished.

As someone who has largely played Mill for the better part of a few decades now. I have gotten a front row seat for these types of interaction. I think Land Destruction, Mill, Discard all have one thing in common. They attack on axes that generally aren't accounted for. Making your deck resilient to these requires you to commit a fair bit of resources and probably makes your deck worse against the way 95% of decks attack you on.

To use your example of Bolting the Bird, generally, you are prepared as a player for your bird to get bolted. You likely aren't prepared to see it milled.

One way to make messing with lands feel fair is to pause lands. Maybe give them a stun counter. Counter can be removed so it feels interactive and they disappear on their own.

I think that the "feels bad" of any of these interactions is more than just the feeling of powerlessness. The importance of unsatisfied expectations is equally important. If you've made a choice and committed resources to playing something then you're probably already thinking about what the game state is going to be like from here on out. The next turn or series of turns where you've progressed your gameplan and increased your possibility space as a result of the fact that this card has resolved is becoming a reality for you. When someone says NOPE then you're now having to grieve the loss of not just the card but the game as it was supposed to be.

I'm with the thinking of removal and counterspells flip. Counterspells forces your opponent making a choice, you can bait them or whatever. Removal, you just play your cards and EoT your opponent just gets to pick the best thing to kill with maximum information. People get hung up on the 1 out of 100 games where someone countered all their stuff and killed them with a delver or whatever and not the 40 other games where their opponent point and clicked killed all their best threats l.

flavour conveying intuitive info without infodumping is probably one of the most genius and valuable things in a game, be it video, board, tabletop or any type of game.
absolutely a hallmark of good games and their design.

I dunno... I think there needs to be an answer for land mana ramp. Currently land destruction manages to do that. I've let go of my hatred for land destruction because of my hatred for land ramp is stronger when I'm of playing against someone with tons land ramp and I'm effectively locked out from doing anything effective by turn 3.

The RTS comparison is great, I wish resource destruction was allowed to be a bigger part of card game strategy. Specially in the ones where even control decks are forced to play into the board anyway, like many of the modern ones. I kinda want to try it with Magic cards, and then reworking how land drops and card draw work to make it more granular (something like destroying a land for every 3 creatures that deal combat damage, but having the choice between drawing land or non-land each turn).

I've found that Resource Denial exposes the deck building of a player and new players really don't like "checks".

Very often new players skimp on vital parts of a deck like lands, card draw, removal, ect. in favor of more threats.

So when a newer player runs into a situation they are for all intents unequipped to handle, it can feel really bad.

Milling a combo piece or their 1 removal card - feels bad

Destroying 6 of their lands when they only have 30 in their 99 card commander deck - feels bad

Making them discard their last 2 cards when they don't have ways to accrue more than 1 card a turn - feels bad

The reason Thoughtseize feels so bad is that the opponent gets to make the decision with perfect information.  When an opponent bolts your Bird, many times you didn't really need that bird.  It was nice to have but your opponent will often use a removal spell that perhaps they didn't need to use because you have something better to follow it up--or at the least, something just as good.  When you get Thoughtseize'd, the opponent gets to take the card that would cause him the most trouble and it often puts a big dent in your gameplan because of that, at least when Thoughtseize works at its best.  After a mulligan, it feels REAL bad because a 5 card hand without its best card doesn't beat much.  But often when your creatures are removed, the opponent has guessed wrong and used the removal spell too early.  Thoughtseize doesn't have that issue--the best time to use it is always immediately.

I think land destruction is a very necessary part of the game and its just another counter to big land ramp that is very prevelent especially to EDH. Everyone is scared to admit that its a vital part in the game. Green players mainly ramp out and then value snowball way harder than any other color and that brings inherent strength to the color. Green players then also gatekeep the only counter to their bullshit strategy by claiming its immoral to run land destruction. It should be normalized to destroy lands, and also WOTC should print more cards that punish land ramping and snowball strategies.

Nobody ever expects the Dingus Egg.  I did a land destruction deck built around nuking the board with Armegeddons and Dingus egg to do damage, and the CoP artifacts from antiquities to keep me alive.  It was awesome back in 94 or 95, at least for me.  Now I want to make a Land-ocrats commander deck around destroying lands for fun and profit.

I feel like the land destruction whining is a self perpetuating meme. If we were ever allowed to actually destroy lands regularly, we'd get used to it.
Like counterspells.

Oddly, my favourite bit was the little part at the end were you talk about flavour and how magic teaches you to expect play patterns.

Interesting some of this seems linked to something I saw a some one else looking at recently, which is the issue of 1-drops in MTG and games with a similar resource system. Which comes when your base is one, then a two drop is twice a expensive, but odds are not twice as good, a three-drop is 3 times as expensive and so on. Here that same logic comes in as losing a single land is a big hit unless its really late in the game. MTG can with standard get around just how good 1-drops are from a resources use perspective by keeping them rare and treating 2-drops as the base line meaning each step up is only 50% more expensive than 100% more expensive. But there's no easy answer on how to apply that to MTG's lands.

Notably they also mentioned a few Japanese card games have you start with two resource cards (along with a 'all cards can be resources') so you play a resource on your first turn and now 3-drops are your baseline, reining in the issue more. But you can't really slap that on Magic without a lot of reworking of the game.