Try driving a car designed for power steering with a failed pump. It's much, much, much harder than a car that was designed from the beginning to be used without power assist. Moving or not it's a hand-over-hand struggle to turn the wheel.
More like “this isn’t comfortable, better pull over and see what’s wrong” harder.
Although I would imagine that the most common failure case is the wheel slowly getting harder to turn over a period of days or weeks.
Some cars probably have more built-in leverage. A sports car may be the worst since it will have a pretty low ratio to begin with. My Camaro might not really be drivable because it has a low ratio rack as well as 285's on the front which are going to be a great big PITA to move.
You are right, it's quite a different experience comparing to cars from a few decades back.
The only bad thing is parking, you get used to it. Gotta take the jacket off before attempting to park in or park out, or you are going to sweat a lot.
I guess you are lucky that your steerimg system is designed to fail more gracefully.
I do this fairly regularly - I race an early 90s Honda Civic in a wheel-to-wheel series where the power steering pump has been closed-looped on purpose (weight savings, one less thing to fail during an 8-24 hour endurance race, etc.)