English is not my native language, but I've been using it for decades. Still have to look up pronunciation. OTOH, my native language Malayalam (and other Indian languages) doesn't really have the pronunciation problem. They're just read as they are written.
Compared to, say, Italian, sure, especially coming from another language using the Latin alphabet with nearly equally consistent and mostly similar mapping between sounds and writing (say, Spanish).
Compared to languages where the primary script isn't even phonetic, though, I don't see it.
English pronunciation inconsistencies are really a product of how many loan words there are, when they entered the language (ie they tend to become more regular over time) and what language they came from (eg you see consistencies in words of Latin origin vs Greek origin).
Also, at least the vowels are written in English (unlike, say, Arabic or Hebrew, generally speaking).
I don’t think words become more regular with time, actually. There are plenty of irregular words of Saxon origin much older than the Norman conquest. This can be seen easily in lists of irregular verbs: there is almost no Latin root there.
English, though, is a slough. Enough practice, thorough practice, and you'll get through it. But it's rough going.
A lot of the languages we learnt in India have a script that's spoken exactly the way it's written. The words contain all the information on how to pronounce it and there are no exceptions. This seems to carry over when we try to learn English (mostly to the everyone's amusement hah).
A difficult pronunciation implies that a language has difficult sounds that non-native speakers can't pronounce (regardless how those sounds are spelled, or even if the language has a writing system at all).