Programming may still be hard, but it certainly has become less mathematical and less low-level, therefore more accessible. I recall that people talked more about Knuth's books, compilers, and OS before 2010. We have less such discussion now. Similarly, people talked a lot more about consistent hashing algorithms, log-structured merge tree, merkel tree, B+-tree, and etc in the early 2010s. I used to read Hacker's Delight and find it useful in my daily work, but not any more. As times goes by, "hard" concepts and algorithms are packaged into well-designed products, and engineers will focus on building products. The complexity can still be there, but they don't necessary have to do with hardcore programming concepts.