But if you are an employee (e.g., a software engineer), it seems like you would want the programming to be hard to challenge yourself since you don't determine what the app should do.
Incentives are the key, or what is an individual incentivized, on a personal level to do.
Indie devs, inherently, due to their status want to finish the job fast and well. Fast, as they likely charge per project. And quality as they want a reference and repeat business.
Devs in corporations want to do the same as well. But some people, for different reasons could not be incentivized to be working fast. This is where good dev ceremonies, like Scrum, can unearth those with lower velocity and get them to produce at the pace the wider team needs them to.
Often you make things "easy" by restricting decisions that need to be made by creating an opinionated framework/language.
There is a place for those who are happy working within a heavily opinionated environment that handles many decisions for them.
The opposite desire, for a more free-form environment, is not the same as desiring it to be difficult. Often the difficulty comes from needing to determine how to chart a path forward or how pieces interact. Not from the actual coding process being difficult.