wtf! what did he smoke?

Any of them can be Software Engineers or not, because we call Software Engineers to the ones with the university career finished

99.9% of the time they do, maybe you don't see them functionally and visually, but probably you aren't measuring security flaws, performance and specially ease of maintenance which goes unnoticed most of the time...

But it's a rhetorical question...

Of course it's easier now, layers and layers have been added over the years to make programming easier, simpler and for a wider audience. Almost any library is made to make a programmer's life easier and simpler, if you didn't have that library and had to fight directly with the underlying layer it would be an order of magnitude harder for you to do it.

So of course it's easier, because being easier or simpler doesn't mean anything if you don't take into account what you're comparing it to. In this case with the difficulty of what was there before this particular library was written.

The problem is that 30, 40, 50 years ago most of the programmers were smart people, engineers, the best of the best... Making programming simpler every year and for a wider audience has made people with no patience to want to be programmers, they want it all chewed up and they want it all now, instead of struggling with the code or documentation (if any) themselves, and they want to be programmers in a month.

If this is not the case then it's because "it's really hard", sorry but no, something that takes you less than a couple of years to learn to reach an intermediate level is not hard.