Its actually not though. only certain things are complex, but you will need to play with that either way because they just go from complex to more complex, like virtual memory or interrupts in general.

A lot of newer things offer different ways to design your code and systems around it, more logical and readable ways.

To give an example: it's not easily discovered your machine just emulates pit/pic via IO-APIC routing to LAPIC :') - its transparent! So if you don't know, and someone told you something else that seems to work, there's no trigger for you to even consider it until you stumble across it by chance.

There are many of these things, especially when in QEMU or such platforms. (how fast does your lapic timer run on qemu vs what the intel docs tell u about its speed?)