If you're talking about intuitions, you have no firsthand intuitions about lifting effort decreasing with distance to the Earth. We can intuit about constant gravity, and the math of constant gravity works fine for this description.

And while the real situation at scale is more complicated, the math is going to come out to the same answer, albeit with extra terms muddying everything up.

If someone says that something true can be illustrated intuitively with a thought experiment, "sure, but what if we take that to a scale where our intuitions fail" is a sort of odd place to take the discussion unless you're genuinely curious how the math is going to shake out.