I've mostly self taught in programming since around 1981, and I've helped several friends and colleagues learn. My impression is that it's more difficult, like you say, but not prohibitively so.
People just instinctively steer clear of the "professional" tools and documentation, and choose their battles. Even well into the Windows 3.1 era, a lot of people who programmed stuck with MS-DOS text mode. Today, our code runs in Jupyter notebooks. We get stuff done. If it needs a framework or a container, we just don't go there.
There's a mild suspicion amongst amateurs, that the professionals are creating the complexity for their own entertainment or job security. It doesn't seem to make the software better (most "users" think that software is getting worse and worse), or less costly to write and maintain.
To put it more charitably, the struggles of commercial programmers are not invisible to us. I work in a department adjacent to a large programming team. By not attempting to write commercial-scale software, we avoid many if not most of the headaches.
People just instinctively steer clear of the "professional" tools and documentation, and choose their battles. Even well into the Windows 3.1 era, a lot of people who programmed stuck with MS-DOS text mode. Today, our code runs in Jupyter notebooks. We get stuff done. If it needs a framework or a container, we just don't go there.
There's a mild suspicion amongst amateurs, that the professionals are creating the complexity for their own entertainment or job security. It doesn't seem to make the software better (most "users" think that software is getting worse and worse), or less costly to write and maintain.
To put it more charitably, the struggles of commercial programmers are not invisible to us. I work in a department adjacent to a large programming team. By not attempting to write commercial-scale software, we avoid many if not most of the headaches.