No, code was always difficult.

To be precise, it depends on the domain. The people who could actually write algorithms or core implementations were always a minority. Programmers like me mostly did copy-paste from Stack Overflow or assembled libraries.

It's not that code wasn't difficult—it really was.

In CRUD apps, about 70~80%of the work was building the same thing over and over, so once you got familiar with it, most of it was repetitive practice. But the number of people who could actually create something new was always small.

Most business programs had issues that arose in the application stage, the application layer. In this application layer, only a very small portion involved difficult logic. Most of it was just applied.

The problem is that people often romanticize the lower layers beyond their own, compilers and low level systems, calling that 'real programming,' and in doing so, they make programming seem harder than it is. In reality, the coding that most people make money from is mostly at the abstracted layers. The infrastructure beneath those layers is owned by giant corporations. If you work at one of those giants, that's fine. But beneath them are countless consumers paying those giants, and the coding that targets those consumers isn't that difficult.

In the end, whether coding was difficult or easy depends entirely on which layer you're working in.

What's certain is that coding was difficult, and it still is.