I also think learning to program is getting harder, but at least you can start easy today. When I started to program in the early/mid 90s it was very difficult for me to start as teenager. I didn't know anybody who did and had a (copy) of a compiler for me. At least I found QBasic (was in DOS included). It was very easy to program and debug something. The program could be as just one line of code. Just hit F5 (as far I remember) and the thing did run. But it was just an interpreter and slow. The included help was pretty good. Later I tryed to program Assembler under DOS. But again, no compiler, I had just the DEBUG function from DOS. With that it was possible to write Assembler direct in memory (but not save to a file). Also no marks for jumps .. you had always to calculate the address by yourself.

My QBasic book had (still has) 416 pages. It included EVERYTHING you could do in QBASIC. My Assembler book was a bit more slim (XT-486, before MMX). A "complete" book today would need over 10000 pages. There are sooo many things you can do. There are almost a infinite number of librarys on github.