This may be true if you work in unfamiliar area or on frontier of programming. But this is not were most of programmer jobs are. That writing code itself is hard is a view of non-programmer. Programmers know that past some threshold of familiarity designing and weighting decisions becomes central problem.
Edit: Also, even outside of video games, I don't remember people being obsessed about software design 10-20 years ago the way they are now. You had some design principles of course and there were obviously bad or redundant ways of doing things, but it's on a whole other level the past 5 years at least from what I remember.
10 years ago was the peak of DDD and Context Mapping, 20 years ago was when The Wiki ruled and everyone was obsessed with design patterns, 30 years ago was UML and Object Mapping... and on, and on, and on.
Fashions change, but one of the few constants in our industry is that everyone has always been obsessed with software design.