Personally I'd say the big change is more that programming has gotten less tedious/annoying rather than easier per se. A lot of older programming languages and operating systems and environments could probably be understood more easily in their totality due to how much less there was to keep track of, while the actual process of coding for them was more of a chore due to the lack of good tooling and frameworks.
Or if you go back enough, even basic aspects of language design being missing. Many variants of assembly language not even having for loops in their modern form for example, and requiring you to manually set them up each time.