This is a very trivial problem, it doesn't even feel right calling it a 'problem'. It's probably the second lesson for the greenest Arduino newbie, right after blinking an LED. Don't let it discourage you from embedded hardware.
I agree with you, don’t let it discourage you from embedded hardware. If you want to be successful in the embedded space, though, this is a great easy example to show that you need to take into account a bunch of physical effects when you’re doing hardware. Capacitors change their value with temperature and applied voltage (!), resistors have capacitance and inductance (which may or may not matter), clock crystals change frequency with temperature, switches bounce, ADCs have sampling capacitors that need to charge, chips power themselves up from active-high TTL lines, etc.
I’ve been doing embedded for 20 years now and one of the biggest things I’ve encountered with new learners is that the Arduino platform is amazing for people to get into the field but they’ll hit a point where something mostly works and they don’t have the rest of the background necessary to debug or understand why it doesn’t work as well as they thought it would. Or works great and then “randomly” blows fuses/burns out of there isn’t a fuse.