Learning to program is getting harder

That's an overly rosy view of the past. Makefiles are inscrutable for a newbie. We're talking hours just to figure out tabs versus spaces for indentation. Google launched in 1998 so that was barely Googleable, there was no Stack Overflow (remember expertsexchange.com?). Older C compilers utterly failed at useful error messages on trivial errors like missing semicolons, or closing strings or braces, and 1998 was before Boost, so good luck getting STL Vectors working. These days languages have hashes/dicts available as a built in data structure. If you were lucky in 1998, you had a C string library and no one had to call ::malloc (or worse, ::realloc).

There have always been major component upgrades if you choose to get distracted. Circa 1998... remember that whole mess with 2.2 vs 2.4 Linux kernel? How about upgrading Debian versions was and that fun with incompatible versions of libc? i386 vs x86_64? STL? How about rewriting to use Boost (version 1 came out in '99)? Getting Boost to build in the first place was at least a multi day adventure.

As a newbie, setting something up on a modern stack is actually pretty easy - because that's no longer something to setup by hand. Clone the tutorial repo, grab their docker container or `npm install`, and you're up and running.

As for whether such legacy program exist anymore it is a mystery.

Had that too. Had full GUIs from tracking mouse movement and writing to the framebuffer.

Our software is more complex, so programming it is.

Let's go with JS, as getting up to basic game design is still fairly simple in it.

Scanning for keycodes is done by a callback, so you need to have a basic idea of scoping, objects, and functions before you can get started. Didn't need any of that in the past, because BASIC's procedural model was dead simple.

Then to draw, you have to either learn about the DOM or the canvas, you can't just POKE and PEEK til it works.

There's nothing wrong with using Python or JS or whatever, but the complexity to get going is much higher than my childhood. For good reasons, but still more complex.

Another day, I went to the local of the university's CS student association. I was excited about what I did the previous day so I told after entering: "yesterday I installed FreeBSD in a virtual machine and did XX". One people replied by what is a virtual machine, and another by what is FreeBSD. I explain to them briefly then left wondering where the people actually interested by the field were. It turns out I met some of them a few months/years later. Both mostly self learners, one with formal training in theology and the other a musicology.

How long does it take to actually understand what all of that does? I can claim to understand it, sure--but I'm also thirty years old and I've been getting paid for this stuff for the last fifteen. (Not, like, random POKEs into memory to make syscalls, for sure, but I understood why stuff like SCREEN 13 worked, along with the general constructs of the language.) On the other hand, I pretty much fully understood how QBasic worked and its interactions with DOS at age 5. I was able to parlay that into C and C++ and into understanding how the thin virtual machine there, simultaneously into PHP and Java and how those actually worked by relating them back to lower-level concepts I'd picked up...

Cargo-cult monkeying about doesn't adequately, to me, replace understanding and insight--and "just make a Rails app and push it to Heroku" is fundamentally cargo-culting. If you don't understand how your tools work, you don't understand what you're doing. (I've written everything from CPU emulators to Rack frameworks to prove that I do understand what I'm doing.) I started doing that literally from the jump as a kid, and the systems were built so that it was something you could easily do.