What is the Jewish answer to why God seems cruel during Exodus?

Please don’t take this as an attack, I’m not familiar with Judaism’s beliefs all that well and I really want to know what is commonly believed. Also please feel free to correct me if anything in this post is inaccurate.

By modern definitions, Exodus seems to have God act in ways that are unnecessarily cruel (Hardening the Pharaoh’s heart and what not.)

I’m not very familiar with the scriptural side of Judaism, so I don’t understand why these things happen during the Exodus story. It’s very easy to find culturally Christian explanations for this event, with culturally Christian atheists using it as proof of a cruel god, well Devote Christians tend to brush the old testament away as wrong.

How do Jews understand the seemingly cruel actions God takes during Exodus and other parts of Jewish scripture? I know there is a lot of debate and diversity of opinion within Judaism, so I’m not expecting a single uniform answer.