When I started learning how to program, it was a million times more difficult than it is today for new people. Back then there was a culture of making new developers learn things on their own and almost never offering any help. That was the hard way.

When the 2000s came by, sharing started to make things easier for new devs because seasoned devs started to open up more to help new devs. All kinds of tutorials online and discussion boards helped out a lot.

When the 2010s came by, there were some really good engines coming out that were pretty easy for new devs to get into with great communities.

Now, from what I can see, it looks like the trend is continuing to make game dev easier to get into for newbs.

The cold hard reality is that games are getting more and more advanced (though there is still a good market for “retro” style video games), which makes it more difficult for new devs to get up to the same level as games that use the existing engines and/or have large teams. But, if you're going to ignore the things that make game dev easier to get into because you want to do things the hard way, that's not the world being unfriendly to you. That's a personal choice. That's not a good or bad choice, but with that choice you have to understand that you're making things harder than they need to be.

Side note: shaders are not that difficult to get into, as long as you don't try to tackle it all at once. There is a youtube channel I like called, “The Art of Code” (Link) that is useful for newbies to get into shaders. You can follow along with the videos and mess around with things and get to know shaders a little at a time until you're good at them.