I’ve been a professional engineer in games for 24 years and can safely say this idea that things aren’t hard anymore is silly. Programming games has definitely got less unpleasant as tooling is much better but the actual mental problems are tough as ever.

You might be mistaking the sheer variety of games and that some are really quite simple for all games being easier to make.

Sorry, but no. This is not true. It definitely was hard. So hard that few people actually made games. I remember using GAS (Unreal Engine) and being baffled by the complexity of the framework. And then when I didn't use GAS, I was baffled by the complexity of what it handled. It's hard.

if you're thinking purely about game loops and game mechanics, yes a lot has been done before and used over and over again. but that's by no means all the programming going on.

just look at how much people complained about poorly optimized games in the past decade. the most impressive game dev feats in terms of programming were not the game mechanics, it was getting their game to run as well as it did on (very) limited hardware resources, a problem we are hitting again now. and it is very obvious looking at modern games that this problem is nowhere near solved, and in fact very hard.

What are you talking about? Maybe for throwaway mobile games. Serious game dev is full of novel challenges. New graphics techniques are constantly being researched and discovered. There are critical resource constraints unique to every game, and each one needs bespoke solutions. There aren't one size fits all solutions to most high fidelity games.

> It's long, tiring, sometimes boring

all those things equal time and money eg. difficulty