> I take many people being bad at programming as evidence that programming is hard, not that it's easy.
We are in violent agreement. Note that "hard" is not the same as "abstract and intellectually demanding". Running a marathon is hard. Becoming a US Marine is hard. Many things are hard that do not primarily require quasi-mathematical skills.
For that matter, finding gravitational waves is hard but may be just as much about investing enough money (think space-based laser interferometry) or just plain luck.
The ways in which people suck at programming are much more diverse than just a failure of abstraction, otherwise we would all be writing Haskell.
These ways include failure to ask what the user or sponsor wants, failure to make sure we've understood what the user or sponsor said, failure to communicate with other members of the team, failure to question the things we learned in school and always took for granted. All of these are common failure modes in the biz, none of them are a failure of abstraction.
In fact excessive or premature abstraction is a widely recognized failure mode of software engineers, and the myth is responsible in good part for that.