It is easy to write a simple program that concatenate 2 files for examples, it is also easy to create a CRUD database application
Systems programming on the other hand is hard, because to be good at it, you need to understand how the systems work, which is hard, and by hard I mean you need to do a lot of reading and remember many details
I believe Programming is as hard & complex as the Programming Problem domain.
Programming itself is not hard, because concepts like Iteration, functions, conditional branching, recursion, OOP (Inheritance, encapsulation, polymorphism ), etc ... are not that complex, are they?