[FrankHudson]

Well, I'm a similar age, and have been playing a long time, and like the OP, I press too hard with my fretting hand. Always have, and perhaps will until I can't. No, it's not the right way to do it. And yes my old finger joints don't like it, but they haven't stopped me from doing it wrong no matter how much they remind me.

To the degree (small) that I've been able to mitigate this bad practice it's been by practice with attention to applying less pressure. One exercise to do with attention is to purposely lay your fretting fingers on the fretboard as lightly as possible, and then to try to apply just the tiniest more pressure than that. With many guitars you may be surprised at how little pressure it takes to get a clean set of notes. I do wonder though if some of us, even with surface callouses, have "fat" or more absorbent finger tip pads the require more compression to fret cleanly than others.

I avoid low or small "vintage frets" which make it harder to get it right for me, and on electrics I prefer at least medium jumbo style frets. With higher frets I try to get it so that I'm not feeling the fretboard with my fingertips, assuming you can feel that, and with higher frets a tight grip will pull the string sharp and out of tune, so if you have good pitch sense, one's ear may help guide your fretting pressure. I've sometimes idly wondered about a scalloped fretboard just to train myself.

After admitting that vice-grip fretting isn't ideal, I suspect many guitarists survive this bad habit.