Making six figures (by sheer luck of the fact that their work scales better than most jobs, including most harder jobs)
I think the thing about programming is that so much of the "old" world misunderstood how it was hard. There is a lot more creative process stuff involved with programming, and not nearly as much that is codified, that you need to study, as in other fields like physics. And so, it gives people wide leeway to footgun themselves. Just as much, going the other way, it puts a premium on the ability to think and reason in abstractions, to which point, we don't have as strong a "liberal arts" for the STEM world as we do for the literary / humanities / cultural world.
So yes, on one hand, programming is not as hard as physics (to make one example of it). But on the other hand, I knew a person or two doing research in physics who complained how much their work was held back because their colleagues didn't appreciate the effort it took to process all the data that came from their experiments. Folks didn't appreciate how critical all that code was to their research. We see this sort of dynamic replicated throughout the rest of the world.