I think it mostly explained by that in earlier days most people who dived into programming did it because it interested them. Then it became one of most lucrative career path, and naturally it saw surge of people, who do not share same interests. Relative amount of people invested in dive bombing into meaty details dropped, but it quite possible that absolute amount have not declined by much.
While I agree that most of perception that linux is harder than windows comes from the fact what most people already invested they time into learning windows and not linux, there are certain difficulties users have to face then transitioning.
Linux is not uniform platform, and thus solutions to problems might depend on user enviroment. Average user want to have UI solution. But then searching it up they likely to not specify graphical environment or even distro, and thus they will likely mostly see terminal based solutions, mixed with UI solutions some of which will not work out of the box, because they assume KDE environment, while user has gnome.
This is a necessary trade-of for being able to provide extremely customizable system, as opposed to providing lowest common denominator system, but having docs for common tasks that easy to follow.
Turing Complete
It is a game about building functional computer by combining logic gates. Game arranged in series of small puzzles to make it digestible for people without electric engineering degree like me. You slowly build new components, so you can use them later as higher level abstraction until you get to the point of having to program your own computer to solve further puzzles. If you curious how computers work, this game is a gem.